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PRESBYTERIAN  CHURCH  LIBRARY 


Some  Things  to  Remember. 


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LIE 

iRARY  OF  t^RIMCET 

ON 

THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 

Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Arcliive 
in  2015 


I 

I 

( 
i 

https://arcliive.org/details/tliinkingblack22y00craw_0 


THE  LOOK-OUT  HUT 
the  Cliff  overhanging  Lake  Mweru. 


Thinking  Black 


22  YEARS  WITHOUT  A  BREAK  IN  THE 
LONG   GRASS   OF    CENTRAL  AFRICA 


D.  CRAWFORD,  F.R.G.S. 

(Koaga  Vantu) 


"  There's  a  legion  that  never  was  listed^ 
That  carries  no  colours  nor  crest. 
But  split  in  a  thousand  detachments 
Is  breaking  the  road  for  the  rest" 

JUL  2  9  2003 

[  J 

J'  '  \i.^:^Y 

GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK 


First  Edition  .  .  3500 
Second  Impression  .  5000 
Second  Edition    .  5000 


3rd  December  1912 
19th  December  1912 
30th  August  1913 


Copyright  by  Morgan  Sr'  Scott  Ld.,  igi2 


PUBLISHERS'  NOTE 


The  soon -to- die  Livingstone  farewelled  Stanley  in 
these  tragic  words  : 

"  On  crossing  the  Lualaba,  I  shall  go  direct 
S.W.  to  the  copper  mines  of  Katanga.  Eight 
days  south  of  Katanga  the  natives  declare  the 
fountains  [of  the  Nile]  to  be.  When  I  have 
found  them  I  shall  return  by  Katanga  to  the 
underground  houses  of  Rua  ;  .  ;  travel  in  boat 
up  the  river  Lufira." 

Alas  !  the  brave  "  Dawid "  never  so  crossed  the 
Lualaba,  and  this  volume  records  the  fulfilment  of 
Livingstone's  last  desire. 

Most  of  it  written  by  the  flare  of  the  African  camp- 
fire,  the  name  of  this  book  corresponds  with  its  nature. 
The  author  is  thijiking  black  all  the  time  he  is  writing 
the  book  so  named. 


I 

( 


TO 

the  first  lady  who  ever 
penetrated  these  wilds 
MT  IVIFE 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


To  my  friends  at  Bath  and  Glasgow  for  all  their 
loyal  help  during  long  years  of  absence. 

To  Mr.  Arnot,  who  so  kindly  saw  us  off  in  Bihe, 
and  regretted  his  inability  to  come  into  the  Far 
Interior. 

To  all  my  friends  on  the  African  field,  including 
Dr.  Laws  of  Livingstonia,  the  true  Bishop  of  Central 
.Africa. 

To  Miss  Ada  R.  Habershon  for  her  help  in 
revision  and  indexing. 

To  Mr.  Dudley  Kidd  and  Mr.  Bernard  Taylor  for 
some  good  photographs. 


vili 


CONTENTS 


BOOK  I 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I.  First  Fears  Justified        .  .  .  .  i 

II.  First  Things  First  .          .  .  •  i5 

III.  Far,  yet  not  Farthest,  In  .  . 

IV.  Our  African  Apprenticeship  .  .  -39 
V.  "Boring  in"  Farther       .  .  .  -63 

VI.  Eastward  Ho!        .          .          .          .  '91 

VII.  "Own  Up  and  Pay  Up"    ....  109 

VIII.  Dark  Doings  in  Luvaleland         .          .  .129 

IX.  The  Desert  Journey          ....  147 

BOOK  II 

X.  Farthest,  but  Shut,  In     .                    .  .165 

XI.  Vice  Versa   ......  187 

XII.  Shut  in,  but  Almost  Out  ....  207 

XIII.  Black  Suffragettes  ....  227 

XIV.  Thus  Far  and  no  Farther  .  255 
XV.  Red  Sunsets           .....  283 

ix 


X 


CONTENTS 


BOOK  III 

CHAT,  PACE 

XVI.  "Nemesis,  Daughter  of  Night"  .  .  .  297 

XVII.  Our  Eastern  Exodus         .  .  .  -317 

XVIII.  Boring  out  East     .....  345 

XIX.  Kavanga:  The  Gates  of  the  Morning    .  .  373 

XX.  "Great  White  Lake"       ....  391 

XXI.  A  Page  of  History.         ..  .  .  .  409 

XXII.  Black  Man  =  Black  Manners        .  .  .  431 

XXIII.  "The  Year  of  Love":  An  Epilogue      .  .  471 

L'Envoi        ......  4^5 

Index  .....  at  end 


PHOTOGRAPHIC  ILLUSTRATIONS 


♦ 

THE    LOOK-OUT   HUT,   on  the  Cliff  overhanging 

Lake  Mweru      .  .  (In  full  colours)  Frontispiece 

PAGB 

A  Typical  "Dew-Drier"     .  .  .  .  .18 

Smoking  Indian  Hemp         ,  .  .         .  -31 

Setting  the  Supper  Trap.   Query  :  A  Bird  or  a  Rat  ?  .  58 

The  Eternal  Problem,  "How  to  Cross"  .  .  75 

A  Typical  "Mop"  Headdress        .  .  .  .86 

A  Typical  Soldier's  Wife   .  .  .  .  .104 

A  Precocious  Princeling     .  .  .  .  .120 

Vastness  of  Africa.    Map  .  .  .  .  .164 

A  TYPICAL  "WIPE  OUT"         .  {In  full  colours)  174 

One  of  Mushidi's  500  Wives         ....  232 

A  Learned  Lake  Mweru  Chief      ....  242 

It's  not  the  Hands  that  Steal,  but  the  Heart  .  244 

A  Luban  Lady  ......  286 

Bane  and  Antidote — A  Great  Snake  Specialist  .  -312 

ON  THE  LUALABA  .  {In  fill  colours)  320 

Old    "Mrs.    Hitherto"    and    Little    "Miss  Hence- 
forward" ......  354 


xii    PHOTOGRAPHIC  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The  Traveller's  Terror     .          .          .          .          .  376 

LUANZA,  The  Mission  Town  built  on  the  Cliff  over- 
hanging Lake  Mweru.             .          {In  fuU  colours)  412 

A  Specimen  of  Town  Planning  in  Africa  .          .          .  446 

Four  Thousand  Pounds  of  Beef  at  6d.  the  Lot          .  466 


THEN  and  NOIV 


"  Wanting  is — what  ? 
THEN  Summer  Redundant, 

A.D.  1889  Blueness  Abundant, 

Where  is  the  blot?" 

Peering  back  through  the  haze  of  twenty-three  years, 
behold  the  retrospect  I  There  goes  the  West  Coast 
slipping  silently  past  under  the  port  bow,  and  Africa 
(much-loved,  much-blamed  Africa)  unrolls  the  panoraina 
of  her  coast-line  in  seductive  welcome.  Only  the  other 
day  embarking  at  London  with  a  cold  heaven  glittering 
overhead  like  blue  steel ;  now,  here  you  are  under  the 
line,  where  sleepy  coast  towns  lie  hidden  in  the  haze  of 
sun. 

Then  comes  the  landing  at  Bengtiella,  where  the 
surprises  are  marvellously  many.  All  your  ship-board 
surmisings,  you  discover,  were  easy  and  elementary 
error.  How  little  you  knew  of  the  African  puzzle  is 
seen  when  it  leaks  out  that  the  very  name  (''Africa'.") 
is  utterly  unknown  to  the  negro.  A frica  ?  He  never 
heard  such  a  hideous  word.  It  is  a  mere  tag,  a  mere 
ticket  stuck  on  the  back  of  this  poor  Continent  by  out- 
siders. A  perfect  parable  all  this  of  A frica,  the  land, 
and  the  African,  the  man.  A  straw  indicates  the 
current,  and  if  we  know  not  the  name,  then  we  know 

xiii 


XIV 


THEN  AND  NOW 


less  of  the  nature  of  black  place  and  black  person,  of 
black  man  and  blacker  manners. 

♦  ♦  * 

Another  dawning  surprise.  No  delirium  of  speed 
here.  No  catching  of  tram  or  train  by  the  fraction  of  a 
second.  There  never  was  a  taxi  in  all  these  latitudes, 
never  was  anything  on  wheels.  Fifteen  miles  per  day 
lies  ahead  from  water  to  water,  from  camp  to  camp. 
Speed  ?  Now  it  is  you  endorse  the  old  definition  that 
speed  is  only  a  mad  method  whereby  you  miss  as  much 
as  possible  between  starting-point  and  destination.'' 

*  ♦  ♦ 

Then  again.    No  wayside  inn ;  no  apartments  to  let. 
You  must  find  your  own  hut  in  the  woods.     Why  not  ? 
As  Thoreau  patly  puts  it,  "  There  is  some  of  the  same 
fitness  in  a  man  building  his  own  house  that  there  is 
in  a  bird  building  its  own  nest." 

But  worse  still.  As  a  slap-in-the-face  surprise 
comes  the  realisation  that  you,  the  newcomer,  are  not 
at  your  best;  that,  in  fact,  to  come  to  Africa  means 
to  come  ''down"  to  Africa.  Even  before  sighting  the 
African  coast,  and  while  still  far  out  at  sea,  we  saw 
the  whole  co7ning  problem  in  another  panoramic  parable. 
This  time  it  is  a  romantic  river  reading  us  a  lesson,  and 
by  way  of  warning  that  the  confluence  of  the  Congo 
might  soon  be  expected,  Jiere  is  our  blue  Atlantic  painted 
a  muddy  brown  eight  iniles  out  into  the  ocean.  Parable, 
surely,  of  the  ugly  fact  we  are  soon  to  prove  that  evil 
African  communications  corrupt  good  European  manners. 
There,  in  that  monster  mouth  of  the  Congo,  yawning 
seven  iniles  wide,  and  votniting  its  dirty  contents  into 


THEN  AND  NOW 


XV 


the  blue  Atlantic — there,  I  say,  you  see  the  sad  and 
symbolic  story  of  decadence  on  the  West  Coast  of 
Africa.  For  the  fearful  fact  must  be  faced  that  all 
things  European  degenerate  in  Central  Africa — Euro- 
pean provisions  go  bad,  European  fi'uits,  European 
dogs  degenerate.    So,  too,  European  men  and  women. 

♦  +  * 

And  now  the  wheel  comes  round  full 
NOW        circle.     Emerging  from  a  long  shut-in 
A.D.  19 1 2.    iijg  jp'dj.  Interior,  one  receives  quite 

a  mental  jolt  on  striking  the  first  tin  town"  of  ad- 
vancing civilisation.  Where  are  you  ?  have  you  struck 
the  planet  Mars  ?  The  long  lapse  of  years  makes  it 
all  strangely  familiar  and  familiarly  strange.  One 
opines  one  has  dreamed  all  this  years  and  years  ago. 
Can  I  believe  my  eyes  ?  There,  jutting  out  of  the  grass, 
I  see  two  spokes  of  iron  coming  up  from  the  South — my 
first  railway  train  in  twenty-two  years ! 

♦  ♦  ♦ 

Then  again.  Right  across  Africa,  remember,  there 
never  was  a  shop,  so  here  it  is,  while  the  human  tide  pours 
along,  you  are  all  eyes  at  the  seductive  shop  window  of 
some  little  local  Selfridge  s,  the  tin  towns  universal  pro- 
vider. Fascinated  as  by  a  basilisk,  you  gaze  stare-struck 
at  this  dream  of  past  years — a  shop  window  !  There  are 
crowds  of  renegade  natives  from  the  North  down  here  at 
the  rail-head:  poor  specimens  these,  sucked  into  the  whirl- 
pool of  gambling  and  gin  boosing.  This  is  the  place 
where  the  new  arrival  from  the  train  can  see  just  enough 
of  the  debased  type  of  African  to  keep  kiftt  from  the 
desire  of  seeing  more. 


I 


xvi 


THEN  AND  NOW 


Booming  up  from  Rhodesia  comes  the  mad  northward 
surge  of  invading  civilisation.  To  use  the  language  of 
Holland,  the  dykes  are  down  and  the  ocean  is  pouring 
in  on  poor  Central  Africa.  Transitional  periods  are 
notoriously  times  of  peril.  But  here  is  a  horrible,  hectic- 
flush  crisis  which  you  can  only  denominate  as  "  the 
terrors  of  transition."  Carlyle  is  the  only  man  who 
expresses  the  real  reason  of  it  all.  ''Perfect  ignorance" 
says  he,  "  is  quiet,  and  perfect  knowledge  is  quiet,  but  the 
transition  from  the  former  to  the  latter  is  a  stormy  one." 
As  weird  as  it  is  wild,  here  you  have  the  meeting  and 
mixing  of  widely  divergent  men  and  manners,  igi2  B.C. 
coming  sharply  round  the  metaphoric  corner  and  looking 
igi2  A.D.  full  in  the  funny  face.  It  is  all  as  droll  as 
though  a  Pharaoh  of  the  Moses  periofi  proposed  to  sit 
down  with  a  Cockney  in  a  Central  African  forest  and 
eat  sardines  together  I 

Here  at  last  you  have  struck  the  uttermost  man  in  the 
uttermost  parts  of  the  earth.  Utterfjiost  white  man, 
probably,  as  well  as  uttermost  black,  for  both  races  are  in 
the  grip  of  Carlyle  s  terrors  of  transition.  Life  here  at 
the  rail- head  is  a  mad  medley  of  natives  warped  from 
their  primitive  simplicity  by  Etiropean  influence,  and  of 
poor  old  white  men  not  less  profoundly  77iodified  by  a 
climate  and  surroundings  to  which  they  were  not  born. 
*  ♦  ♦ 

Yet  all  the  while  ones  heart  is  out  of  it  and  awg,y  off 
North  on  its  own.    Up  past  the  Lufira,  up  past  the  Range, 
away  up  to  ones    ain  coiintrie." 

+  ♦  * 

Afar  the  Golden-Crested  Crane  is  calling ! 


BOOK  I 

CHAPTER  I 
First  Fears  Justified 


"Mombaza,  and  Quiloa,  and  Melind, 
And  Sofala,  thought  Ophir,  to  the  realm 
Of  Congo,  and  Angola  farthest  South." 

Paradise  Lost,  xi.  399. 

*  *  * 

"The  African  race  is  an  indiarubber  ball.  The 
harder  you  dash  it  to  the  ground  the  higher 

it  will  rise."  Bantu  Proverb. 

«  «  « 

"We  negroes  are  one  in  racial  unity  with  you 
whites  —  different  yet  the  same.  A  crocodile  is 
hatched  from  an  egg — and  a  flying  bird  from  an 
egg.  The  Emperor  Mushidi. 

♦  *  ♦ 

"The  Earth  is  a  beehive:  we  all  enter  by  the 
same  door  but  live  in  different  cells." 

Bantu  Proverb. 


■ 


CHAPTER  I 


First  Fears  Justified 

HEREIN  the  reader^  landing 
at  Benguella,  finds  himself  faced 
with  Africa's  first  and  final  law  —  to 
put  down  a  lot  one  must  put  up  with 
a  lot. 

LET  us  begin  at  the  beginning.  Coasting  down 
West  Africa  the  year  of  grace  1889,  the  first 
thing  to  strike  you  in  the  ever-shifting  drama  is 
the  sarcastic  significance  of  Milton's  mention  of  these  lands 
in  such  a  poem  as  Paradise  Lost,  ' '  the  Realm  of  Congo 
and  Angola  farthest  South."  For,  as  he  safely  guessed, 
Paradise  is  lost,  very  much  lost  in  these  latitudes.  There 
is  tropical  treachery  even  in  those  poor  brown  palms  you 
see  flitting  past,  for  where  is  defeat  so  common  for  a  white 
man  as  just  there  on  those  sands  of  the  seaboard,  the  air 
all  a-dance  with  heat  ?  A  taunting  palm  over  a  tin  shanty, 
symbol  not  of  victory  but  disaster.  Each  and  every 
solar  ray  giving  the  exile  two  knocks  :  the  first,  en  route 
to  earth,  striking  the  man  on  its  way  down,  the  second 
getting  him  again  on  the  rebound  from  the  sparkling 

2 


4 


THINKING  BLACK 


sand.  Each  day  two  burning  darts  per  ray — and  how 
many  billion  rays  per  day  ?  ■ 

Take  the  negro  now  and  watch  withal  a  curious  thing. 
I  mean  that  hard,  impersonal  stare  of  these  bottomless- 
eyed  natives,  not  the  intense,  penetrating  thing  of  Europe. 
You  might  be  something  worked  on  tapestry  or  painted 
on  a  china  cup,  so  impersonally  does  he  look  at  you.  He 
even  denies  you  credit  for  any  act  of  your  own  personal 
prowess  or  initiative,  shooting  for  example.  For  if,  per- 
chance, you  draw  a  most  careful  bead  on  a  buck  and  drop 
him  flat  in  his  tracks,  he  as  carefully  sees  to  it  that  he 
allocates  the  praise  between  your  gun  and  your  imaginary 
"  medicine,"  fifty  per  cent  apiece,  and  never,  nay  never  a 
crumb  for  you.  You  are  merely  the  spoiled  and  petted 
child  of  a  privileged  civilisation — you,  what  have  you 
done  ?  Only  taken  the  trouble  to  be  born  white  a  little 
north  of  his  south — nothing  more.  "  Beyond  the  sea  "  is 
their  great  adjective  for  anything  newfangled  or  European, 
your  very  Gospel  being  only  another  "beyond  the  sea" 
innovation.  "The  white  man's  parable"  is  another  of 
their  ugly  names  for  our  Evangel,  a  taunt  this  with  the 
old  Ezekiel  sting  in  it :  "Ah  Lord  God  !  they  say  of 
me,  Doth  he  not  speak  parables  ? " 

But  let  us  end  these  didactics  and  come  to  our 
chronicle.  This  is  how  we  really  begin.  Ignoring  the 
ocean  voyage  sailed  in  sameness  for  hundreds  of  years,  we 
land  on  the  Atlantic  seaboard  at  Benguella.  Portuguese 
to  the  core,  here  you  find  a  tropical  town  nearly  fast 
asleep  in  1889 — asleep,  and  no  wonder.    For  most  of  these 


FIRST  FEARS  JUSTIFIED 


5 


Portuguese  have  been  boiling  in  this  tropical  kettle  for 
many  years,  with  the  climatic  result  that  many  have  a 
lethargic  glaze  on  their  eyes.    There  is  also  that  curious 
listless  look  on  his  swarthy  Latin  face  suggestive  of  the 
well-known  contemplative  air  of  a  man  for  whom  time 
and  distance  are  not.    Certes,  what  the  average  man  from 
the  Tagus  seems  to  need  is  a  subcutaneous  injection  of 
the  busy  spirit  of  John  Bull.    In  moments  of  extreme 
exuberance,   our  sallow  friend  from  Lisbon    has  been 
seriously  seen  to  walk,  but  the  average  attitude  is  notori- 
ously one  of  repose.    The  oleaginous  collection  of  messes 
which  they  eat  from  the  points  of  their  knives  accounts 
for  it  all.    Rumour  runs  that  he  even  refuses  to  drink 
coflfee  in  the  morning  lest  it  should  keep  him  awake  the 
rest  of  the  day.    A  Portuguese  with  a  long  romantic 
moustache,  lolling  about  on  chairs  in  somewhat  unusual 
attitudes,  is  the  commonest  sight  in  the  day.    Thus,  with 
sleepy,  sun-baked  senses,  he  loses  himself  in  long  time- 
effacing  reveries.    The  American  version  of  it  is  that  he 
sits  as  solemnly  as  though  he  meant  to  take  root — so  you 
see  what  slavery  has  done  for  the  Portuguese.  This 
Western  Zanzibar,  remember,  is  the  great  Portuguese 
entrepot  of  slavery,  slave   labour  nearly  running  the 
whole  concern.    And  did  not  the  Romans  say,  "  As  many 
slaves,  so  many  enemies  "  ? 

Scarcely  one  Portuguese  lady  in  the  place.  All  their 
colonies  have  gone  shipwreck  by  defying  the  foundation 
truth  that  wherever  duty  summons  man,  woman  has  a 
corresponding  duty  in  the  same  place.    Be  he  Teuton  or 


6 


THINKING  BLACK 


Latin,  a  man  ever  will  be  what  his  mother,  wife,  or  sister 
makes  of  him,  an  influence  this  that  begins  at  the  cradle 
and  ends  in  the  grave.  A  monthly  steamer  in  these 
dismal  days  is  the  only  distraction,  and  the  black  plume 
of  smoke  on  the  skyline  sends  a  monthly  flutter  through 
the  hot  hole.  But  for  many  a  day,  alas  !  our  expected 
flutter  from  the  Interior  does  not  come,  because  the 
transport  road  is  blocked  and  no  advance  possible.  Thus 
you  see  us,  here  on  the  threshold  of  our  long  and  happy 
life  ahead,  confronted  with  a  truly  typical  contretemps  so 
wholly  explanatory  of  many  a  day  to  come  in  the  Far 
Interior.  I  mean  that  "  blocked  road."  Now  it  is  the 
old  conventional  phrase  in  England  about  "  your  way 
being  opened  up "  assumes  a  sacred  literal  value,  for  the 
very  narrowness  of  the  trail  is  itself  eloquent  of  its 
liability  to  be  easily  shut.  Knocking  as  we  have  done  at 
Central  Africa's  back  door  of  Benguella,  have  we  not  found 
the  said  door  locked  ?  The  native  carrier  trade  is  in  a 
state  of  stagnation,  and  the  God  Who  shutteth  and  no 
man  openeth  thereby  challenges  us  with  this  loving  Qui 
va  la? 

Unlike  the  voyage  inland  from  the  malarial  mouth  of 
the  Congo  farther  North ;  unlike  the  long  winding  crawl 
from  Chinde  up  the  Zambezi  on  the  East  Coast,  here  at 
Benguella  you  find  Africa  doing  a  fine  thing  in  rising 
almost  sheer  from  the  sea.  The  hills  stand  out  in  jet 
black  silhouette  from  the  humid  coast,  and  in  a  few  hours, 
if  the  natives  would  only  fall  in  with  Nature's  idea,  you 
could  be  over  the  mountain  wall  and  well  on  your  way  to 


FIRST  FEARS  JUSTIFIED  7 

the  breezy  uplands  of  Bihe.  But  Mr.  Negro  looks  on 
with  ineffable  complacency,  auii  refuses  to  league  with 
Nature  in  favour  of  outsiders.  At  this  early  stage  he 
knows  little  and  cares  less  for  Mr.  Missionary ;  what  he 
does  seem  sure  about  is  that  the  sun  rises  and  sets  for 
No.  1  alone.  Yet  let  us  give  him  his  due.  Unlike  the 
Saxons,  Danes,  and  Jutes  who  were  invited  by  the  ancient 
Britons  to  enter  England,  here  you  have  the  black-but- 
comely  African  honestly  warning  you  oflF  both  his  soil 
and  his  soul.  Frankly  saying  in  so  many  looks  if  not  so 
many  words  that  he  would  rather  have  your  room  than 
your  company.  Why  should  he  scrape  and  bow  to 
persons  with  no  more  fingers  and  toes  than  he  has 
himself  ? 

A  new  land,  however,  really  means  a  new  vocabulary, 
and  here  with  this  mention  of  "road"  in  Africa  we  must 
pause  to  define  our  terms.  The  substantive  "road"  pre- 
sents its  compliments  to  the  English-speaking  public  and 
hereby  notifies  a  new  aspect  of  its  dictionary  meaning. 
For  just  as  you  throw  away  your  Bradshaw  when  you 
leave  the  land  of  trains,  so  neither  Webster  nor  Nuttall 
can  tell  you  what  an  African  "road"  is.  Though  it  is 
the  true  trunk  road  to  the  vast  Interior,  yet  the  real 
name  for  this  thing  is  a  "  trail,"  literally  a  trivial  trail  the 
size  of  a  cart-wheel  rut.  And  so  it  comes  about  that  here 
at  the  Benguella  doorway  you  get  your  initial  surprise 
that  this  Africa  for  thousands  of  twisty  miles  ahead  is  a 
land  wholly  innocent  of  roads,  and  boasts  only  this  cart- 
wheel rut  as  a  highway.    "  Goat-walks"  is  the  real  idea, 


8 


THINKING  BLACK 


those  sheep-tracks  found  across  the  Welsh  mountains. 
Described  at  greater  length  anon,  here  at  the  outset  it  is 
absolutely  necessary  to  point  out  how  in  this  serpentine 
path  we  have  the  strategic  key  to  the  citadel  of  the  black 
brain.  "  Thinking  black  "  this,  verily.  It  is  the  African's 
way  of  doing  things  as  well  as  his  way  of  walking,  and 
mentally  Mr.  Negro  spends  life  carving  out  for  himself  a 
theory  that  will  fit  the  facts  of  this  corkscrew  path.  Take, 
for  instance,  the  necessary  monotonous  Indian  file  this 
same  narrow  trail  of  ours  involves  :  there  is  a  whole 
negro  philosophy  of  "follow  your  leader"  meaning  in 
this.  For  as  we  saw,  see,  and  shall  see,  the  negro's  "  way  " 
of  doing  a  thing  is  merely  to  do  it  as  the  man  who  went 
before  him  did  it.  The  slaves  of  precedent,  they  dog  the 
steps  of  a  thousand  ancestors,  and  such  is  the  tenacity  of 
the  negro  type  that  to  this  day  their  whole  outfit  of  the 
twentieth  century  a.d.  can  be  found  perfectly  reproduced 
on  Egyptian  monuments  of  the  same  century  B.C.  Hence 
the  Bantu  song  : — 

"  A  well-worn  trail  is  a  very  good  thing. 
It  must  lead  up  to  a  very  great  King; 
And  so  with  customs  of  days  of  yore. 
We  do  what  millions  have  done  before." 

That  is  to  say,  precedent,  not  principle,  is  their  black 
law.  And  any  African  dictionary  tells  the  whole  tale,  for 
around  this  germinal  word  "  path "  there  constellate  a 
dozen  ideas  like  law,  prohibition,  transgression,  plan,  etc. 

Thus  glorying  in  this  long  Indian  trail  of  antiquity, 
the  Bantu  tribes  boast  the  identical  Egyptian  kilt,  mortar, 


FIRST  FEARS  JUSTIFIED  9 


pestle,  and  cooking  ware  of  the  Moses  period.  Nor  need 
we  wonder  at  all  this,  for  is  not  Egypt  the  door  of  Africa  ? 
Moral :  A  thousand  years  are  as  one  day  in  African 
manners.  Time  may  laugh  at  the  Pyramids,  but  the 
Pyramids  laugh  at  time. 

Beware,  too,  of  those  shags  jutting  out  along  that  trail — 
shags  metaphoric,  I  mean,  as  well  as  shags  material.  There 
is  the  upstart  Rob  Roy  ahead  blocking  the  way  with  his 
"  money  or  your  life "  ultimatum ;  an  ugly  shag  he. 
There  are  those  sons  of  Belial,  the  Luvale  bandits,  who 
hold  you  up  for  days  and  go  into  committee  on  the  subject 
of  your  ransom  ;  uglier  shags  they.  "  Gentlemen  of  the 
road  "  these,  who  egg  you  on  to  sell  your  soul  by  bullying 
and  bouncing  them.  Would  admire  you  immensely  (you, 
a  Missionary  of  the  Prince  of  Peace)  if  all  the  while  your 
index  finger  curved  itself  around  the  trigger  of  a  persuasive 
six-shooter.  Finally,  there  is  the  great  Mushidi  himself 
at  the  end  of  it  all,  half-way  across  Africa,  blocking  this 
trans-continental  trail  and  making  it  a  blind  alley.  You 
have  Dr.  Moloney's  authority  for  it  that  in  later  days, 
when  Captain  Stairs  found  us  imprisoned  at  Bunkeya, 
Mushidi  called  us  his  "  white  slaves." 

But  among  the  many  intricacies  of  this  "  cobweb  path  " 
the  great  system  of  Nkole — the  Luban  word,  this — makes 
you  gasp  at  its  ramifications.  Here  you  have  a  thing 
spreading  from  sea  to  sea,  and  in  this  mad  manoeuvre  you 
focus  the  real  reason  of  all  their  troubles.  For  what  is 
Nkole  but  only  a  "  catch-your-pal "  movement,  a  snatch 
suretyship  when  a  harmless  third  party  is  kidnapped  and 


10 


THINKING  BLACK 


kept  in  durance  vile  for  the  sins  of  some  unknown  second 
party  ?    No  wonder  the  African  roads  are  all  blocked 
intertribally.    Here  is  harmless  Jones  coming  along  the 
trail,  and  they  pounce  on  him  as  surety  for  the  crime  of 
some  unknown  John  Smith,  the  theory  being  that  Jones, 
one  bright  day,  will  retaliate  and  swoop  down  on  Smith, 
claiming  damages  for  illegal  seizure.    Now  try  and  con- 
ceive what  a  tangle  of  triangles  this  makes  all  over  the 
land,  for  in  a  thousand  cases  the  stranger-surety  A.  never 
saw  in  the  flesh  the  conjectural  culprit  B.    But  what  is 
that  to  C.  the  kidnapper  ?    Is  not  this  his  only  way  of 
setting  the  clumsy  legal  mill  in  motion  ?    Moral  :  He 
that  is  surety  for  a  stranger  must  smart  for  it.  Take 
even  your  best  type  of  negro  and  try  and  argue  some 
sense  into  him  on  this  cobweb  system  of  native  paths  and 
he  shows  not  a  twinge  of  penitence.    No  ;  unwarped  and 
unbiased  as  he  looks,  this  Nkole  idea  he  defends  as  a 
time-honoured  maxim,  the  treacherous  triangle  of  the 
thing  being  its  best  point — yea,  is  it  not  a  triangle,  and 
therefore  all  point  together  1 

But  it  is  generally  the  Missionary  who  has  got  to  pay. 
Even  in  later  days  this  Bantu  bed-rock  idea  still  clings  to 
the  semi-educated  African.  Listen  to  another  Nkole  tale, 
with  quite  a  touch  of  terror  in  it,  a  noble  white  man  the 
victim ;  the  author  of  it  all  only  a  negro  body  smarting 
under  a  sense  of  personal  wrong.  The  scene  is  out  East 
in  more  civilised  conditions.  Maltreated  by  a  brother 
black,  this  man  is  exasperated  to  find  that  his  enemy 
is  too  strong  for  him  ;  has  a  sort  of  aristocratic  status, 


FIRST  FEARS  JUSTIFIED 


11 


that  is  to  say,  "an  untouchable,"  and  therefore  out 
of  reach. 

Query  No.  1  :  How  can  this  nobody  get  his  rights 
without  committing  some  wrongs  ? 

Query  No.  2  :  How  can  a  man  have  wrongs  if  he  has 
no  rights  ? 

And  thus  with  much  fertility  of  brain  he  concocts  a 
fantastic  tragedy  with  this  old  bugbear,  Nicole,  as  germinal 
notion.     Laying  his  plans  with  consummate  care,  he 
singles  out  the  house  of  a  harmless  Missionary,  and  this 
goaded  black  resolves  to  burn  it  down,  the  "surety"  idea 
being  that  he  has  now  brought  matters  to  a  head  by 
dragging  into  the  wrangle  a  mightier  than  his  mightv  foe. 
And,  sure  enough,  a  terrible  triangle  he  makes  of  it  all, 
for  up  goes  the  godly  man's  house  in  a  blaze,  thus  ensur- 
ing an  opening  up  of  the  whole  question,    [.ittle  did  that 
poor  bush  black  guess  how  he  honoured  that  Missionary, 
for,  like  his  Master,  was  he  not  made  surety  for  the 
stranger  and  did  he  not  smart  for  it  ?    But  the  darkest 
deed  is  yet  to  come.    This  black  stoic  knows  far  too  well 
what  manner  of  act  he  has  done,  so  with  superior  sagacity 
he  resolves  "  to  leave  life  by  the  back  door  " — to  commit 
suicide.    Quite  calmly,  therefore,  he  scratches  a  note  on  a 
bit  of  paper  explaining  his  "terrible  triangle"  plan  and 
then  hangs  himself  on  his  own  club  down  a  game  pit.  Of 
course,  at  this  useless  point  there  is  much  ex  post  facto 
hurry-scurry,  but  all  too  late,  for  the  real  culprit's  debt 
has  been  paid  in  blood  and  fire.     A  lesson  this  how 
deeply  the  roots  of  suretyship  shoot  down  into  the  bone 


12 


THINKING  BLACK 


and  marrow  of  Africa.  Need  I  go  on  ?  There  are 
thousands  of  such  cases. 

This  is  "  thinkinof  black"  with  a  vengeance,  and  as 
usual  the  scapegoat  Missionary  has  got  to  pay  somebody 
else's  debt.  Far  from  this  being  eflfete,  only  the  other  day 
one  of  our  caravans  bound  for  Kavungu  was  plundered  of 
nine  loads  by  the  Achokwe,  and  all  on  this  Nhole  plea. 
The  great  Portuguese  Senhor  (by  name  "  Visese,"  a  ruffian 
endowed  with  more  brains  than  scruples)  had  carried  West 
hundreds  of  captives,  hence  these  patriots  grabbing  at 
the  first  harmless  nobody's  goods  in  retaliation.  Of  daily 
intertribal  occurrence  this  :  take  another  instance. 

Here,  as  I  write,  is  Kaveke,  a  Luban,  who  runs  in  and 
tells  me  with  quick-breathed  rapidity  that  four  of  his 
relatives  have  been  seized  as  Nkole  or  surety,  and  the 
man  of  the  party  killed,  head  cut  off — well-known  Jones 
killed  for  unknown  Smith.  But  that  Nkole  story  is  not 
ended ;  for  when  their  father  was  so  killed,  his  daughters 
were  enslaved  and  the  two  nice-looking  girls  made  chief  s 
concubines.  Let  us  call  Ngoi  the  sort  of  Martha  of  the 
story  and  Mujikle  the  Mary.  Well,  this  latter,  alas  !  had 
scarcely  entered  bondage  when  her  brute  of  a  master  died, 
and  Mary,  a  mere  slip  of  a  girl,  is  now  told  that  she  must 
be  buried  alive  with  her  father's  own  murderer.  So  Mary 
has  died  like  hundreds  more,  the  only  sop  she  got  being  a 
farewell  supper  of  meat  and  mush — a  sort  of  black  bribe 
this,  equivalent  to  the  Euglish  :  "  If  you  are  a  good  little 
girl  you'll  get  jam  with  your  tea."  The  escaped  Martha 
is  now  with  us  at  the  Mission,  and  poor  Mary,  pulsating 


FIKST  FEARS  JUSTIFIED 


13 


with  buoyant  life,  was  buried  alive.    Not  a  dying  yell, 
remember,  but  only  a  great  dry  sob.    0  Africa  ! 

But  it  were  impossible  to  tell  all.  One  cry  there  is, 
though,  so  uniform  the  words  that  it  almost  amounts  to  a 
horrible  technical  term.  Reminiscent  of  the  Epistle  to 
the  Romans  as  it  is,  you  cannot  resist  the  steady  convic- 
tion that  Paul  must  have  known  it  too.  Take,  roughly, 
a  dozen  such  cases  known  to  me — I  mean,  the  living 
forced  to  embrace  the  mortifying  corpse.  The  terrible 
formula  of  their  cry  was  just  Romans  vii.  24  over  again  : 
"  Who  shall  deliver  me  from  this  body  of  death  ?  "  No 
negro  could  ever  read  Paul's  anti-sin  moan  in  Romans 
without  a  special  shudder  at  that  metaphor :  well  he 
knows  what  it  means,  for  often  did  he  hear  that  cry. 
And  long  may  he  shudder  at  sin,  say  I. 

But  nobody  knows  his  Africa  who  is  not  on  terms  of 
intimacy  with  the  fire-flies.  Darting  about  bewilderingly, 
they  flash  their  intermittent  signals  into  the  night,  and 
eight  or  ten  confined  in  a  phial  give  sufficient  light  to 
enable  one  to  write.  At  sundown  behold  a  parable  of 
your  Missionary  tribulation  ahead,  the  fourth  plague  of 
Egypt.  For  no  sooner  do  you  light  up  than  the  thousand 
tribes  of  local  gnats,  flies,  and  moths  mobilise  to  fight 
the  flickering  flame,  each  enunciating  with  impertinent 
emphasis  the  dictum  that  the  fly  or  the  flicker  must  snuff" 
out.  Children  of  night  as  they  are,  you  can  see  them 
swarm  round  that  candle  in  clouds — war-cry  :  We  love 
darkness  rather  than  light,  because  our  deeds  are  evil. 


14 


THINKING  BLACK 


But  the  faithful  flame  flickers  on,  an  apostle  of  light,  true 
"thinking  black"  parable  of  the  Devil's  battalions  trying 
to  snuff"  the  little  lights  of  testimony  twinkling  across 
Africa.  Far-fetched  metaphor  though  this  looks,  yet  can 
we  place  it  under  the  sure  shelter  of  high  authority.  For 
did  not  Faraday  long  ago  begin  his  famous  lecture  by 
declaring  "  there  is  not  a  law  under  which  any  part  of  this 
universe  is  governed  that  does  not  come  into  play  in  the 
phenomena  of  the  chemical  history  of  a  candle "  ?  Not 
that  these  millions  of  midges  haven't  a  method  in  their 
madness.  Hidden  for  their  lives  by  day  in  the  marsh,  full 
well  they  know  that  the  scorching  sun  would  devour  them 
if  they  emerged,  war  to  the  death  being  proclaimed 
between  solar  light  and  these  broods  of  darkness.  What 
wonder,  then,  at  this  their  revenge  on  the  poor  candle,  a 
diminutive  disciple  of  the  sun  spluttering  in  the  night, 
their  vindictive  swoop  eloquent  of  the  anti-light  malice. 
This  certainly  is  the  native's  notion,  for  in  his  alliterative 
language  he  makes  a  linear  pun  of  it — calling  the  lamp  the 
"  Sun's  little  Sonny,"  the  prefixes  rhyming  as  in  English. 

This  is  digression,  though,  and  we  must  get  on  with 
our  story — but  that  means  another  chapter. 


CHAPTER  II 
First  Things  First 


"Sorrow  and  the  scarlet  leaf, 

Sad  thoughts  and  sunny  weather  ; 
Ah  me!  this  glory  and  this  grief 
Agree  not  well  together." 


*'  Though  ye  have  lien  among  the  pots,  yet  shall  ye 
be  as  the  wings  of  a  dove  covered  with  silver,  and 
her  feathers  with  yellow  gold.  .  .  .  Ethiopia  shall 
soon  stretch  out  her  hands  unto  God." 


Psalm  Ixviii.  13,  31. 


"There  is  a  depth  below  the  depth, 
And  a  height  above  the  height : 
Our  hearing  is  not  hearing, 
And  our  seeing  is  not  sight," 


CHAPTER  II 


First  Things  First 

HEREIN  the  reader^  finding  no 
advance  possible,  ponders  and 
probes  Africa's  great  problem  of  "  the 
blocked  road.'' 

SUCH,  then,  is  our  ridiculous  "  road  "  over  the  hills, 
and  lest  peradventure  we  take  too  much  for  granted, 
I  suppose  I  should  explain  that  this  caravan  of  ours 
is  not  by  any  manner  of  means  an  English  four-wheeler  of 
the  gipsy  sort.  Really  a  twisting,  travelling  town  it  is, 
and  there  you  see  more  than  a  hundred  men,  women,  and 
boys  wriggling  along  through  the  tall  grass  in  Indian 
file — the  "  crocodile "  our  negro  facetiously  calls  it.  A 
curious  hotch-potch  of  humanity,  here  you  have  the  small 
tradesman  and  the  dancing  man,  the  musician  and  the 
doctor ;  these  and  many  more  all  twisting  in  and  out 
with  the  trail  in  faithful  "  follow  your  leader  "  fashion. 
This  doctor  fellow  while  drawing  his  rations  as  carrier  has 
also  the  perquisites  of  his  profession  among  his  brother- 
blacks,  the  dancing  man  likewise  reckoning  that  he  can  in 
a  spare  hour  "hand  round  the  hat  "for  a  consideration. 
The  witchery  of  this  man's  tongue  is  wonderful,  for  he 

17 


18 


THINKING  BLACK 


wheedles  round  the  negro  on  his  soft  sing-song  side,  plays 
his  own  accompaniment,  and  has  a  rich  repertory  of  all 
the  tribal  reels,  strathspeys,  and  laments.  Often  over- 
grown with  thick  grass,  the  trail  is  lost  below  it,  and  the 
terror  o'  mornings  is  to  squeeze  your  way  through  this  wet, 
matted  tangle.  The  drier  the  season,  of  course,  the  greater 
the  deluge  of  dew,  and  all  to  be  negotiated  in  the  cold, 
callous  dawn.  Often,  too,  you  get  out  of  your  blankets 
only  to  discover  that  another  thick  blanket  of  mist  lies 
across  your  path,  the  cheerless  sun  looking  through  the 
fog  like  a  snowball.  Real  malarial  mist,  pale  with 
the  awful  pallor  of  death,  and  no  wonder  one  prefers 
the  famous  pea-soup  fog  of  London. 

But  the  weakest  go  to  the  wall  in  all  this,  and  your 
big  black  carriers  push  on  the  shivering  youngsters  ahead 
to  dry  off  the  clammy  dew  on  their  bodies.  "  Human 
brooms,"  they  are  called.  Take  your  stand  against  an 
intolerant  tradition  of  this  "  dew  wiping  "  sort  and  you 
will  be  worsted,  for  they  argue  that  such  is  the  tribal 
mill,  and  had  they  not  all  to  go  through  it  ?  So  here  you 
have  a  literal  case  in  which  "  a  little  child  shall  lead  them," 
mere  babies  driven  on  first  to  brush  off  the  dew.^ 

Have  you  caught  the  idea  ?  No  Factory  Acts  here. 
Mere  babies  goaded  on  ahead  for  the  drenching  dew 
of  this  13-feet-high  grass  to  pour  down  on  them  spray- 

1  By  a  conceit  of  etymology  the  word  "  pioneer  "  is  coined  from  this  very 
idea  of  such  an  one  being  a  "human  broom"  or  "dew  drier,"  and  a  fair 
Enj^lish  equivalent  is  to  call  a  Burton  or  a  Livingstone  "Mr.  Waterproof," 
because  he  braved  the  inclement  days  of  pioneering  and  got  drenched  that 
we  might  go  dry. 


A   TYPICAL  DEW-DRIEH. 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


19 


bath  fashion.  This  grass,  of  course,  is  so  dense  that  it 
hides  the  tiny  trail,  so  each  step  is  a  squeeze  forward  into 
the  unknown,  the  said  squeeze  being  equivalent  to  the 
turning  on  of  the  tap  on  our  little  36-inch-long  nobodies. 
But  there  is  a  law  of  compensation  even  here.  Oh  yes, 
these  nobodies  beconrie  somebodies  with  their  resultant 
revenge.  I  saw  one  such  diminutive  "dew  drier"  oro 
straight  up  to  mamma  and  let  her  have  a  sounding  smack 
in  the  face.  Angry  ?  Not  she.  Dissolving  in  smiles, 
she  looks  at  her  offspring  proudly  :  "  What  a  splendid 
warrior  he'll  make  !  "  Pushed  on  ahead  in  the  dark  dawn, 
of  course,  these  little  bits  of  black  humanity  run  the 
chance  of  a  hungry  old  hyena  or  leopard  lurking  by  the  way 
to  nab  first  comers.  Too  well  are  they  aware  that  even 
the  smallest  contributions  are  always  thankfully  received 
by  the  Carnivora.  And  thus  is  evolved  Africa's  enfant 
terrible,  the  sad  stuff,  forsooth,  out  of  which  Mr. 
Missionary  has  got  to  build  the  poor  little  African  Sunday 
school.  Ragged  schools,  one  might  indulgently  call  them, 
only  the  problem  is  to  produce  even  one  rag  sometimes. 

But  all  this  is  to  anticipate,  for  it  is  easier  to  talk 
about  the  trail  than  to  use  it,  and  we  are  forced  to  settle 
ourselves  down  on  the  sickly  seaboard  like  a  man  in  a 
railway  station  condemned  to  wait  the  next  train.  Heigh 
ho !  here  it  is  you  learn  that  patience  must  be  your  pet 
African  virtue,  and  here,  too,  you  first  face  the  dangerous 
yet  delightful  fact  that  you  are  wholly  in  the  negro's 
hands  for  weal  or  woe.  For  if  those  expected  carriers  of 
ours  don't  come  out  of  the  hills  one  of  these  days  and 


20 


THINKING  BLACK 


pick  us  up,  we  cannot  budge,  a  rueful  reflection  this,  quite 
a  wholesome  corrective  to  British  bluff  and  swagger.  So 
here  on  the  baking  Benguella  sands  we  pass  the  long 
electric  nights  longing  for  the  climbing  of  the  great 
*'  African  Divide."  That  straight,  shy  glance  we  con- 
stantly cast  at  the  brown  girding  hills  is  full  of  desiring 
with  great  desire  to  pass  on  and  into  the  Far  Interior. 
We  long  for  the  uplands  and  brisk  breezes  that  will  blow 
new  ideas  into  the  brain.  Only  to  get  a  start,  only  to 
get  on  our  legs,  this  is  the  sole  African  solution  of 
stagnation.  Solvitur  amhulando  was  the  cunning  little 
Latin  maxim  of  the  thing,  and  the  Luban  has  the  exactly 
equivalent  epigram:  "It  is  settled  in  walking."  Days 
grow  into  weeks  and  still  another  red  sunrise  with  no 
carriers  to  hand ;  only  that  solemn  booming  of  the  great 
Ocean  on  the  sun-smitten  sands.  In  these  dreary  days 
Browning  (!)  in  three  luminous  lines  supplies  the  diary 
data  for  as  many  months  : — 

"The  sun  looked  over  the  mountain's  rim. 
And  straight  was  a  path  of  gold  for  him, 
But  the  need  of  a  world  of  men  for  me." 

Thus  you  see  how  the  African  scores  such  an  easy  first 
in  his  own  land.  Even  this  vaunted  pioneering  of  ours 
he  looks  down  upon  in  a  most  amused  and  patronising 
manner.  Not  that  this  ox-eyed  black  is  lacking  in  many 
a  word  of  cheer  when  you  are  jaded  with  the  journey  ; 
indeed,  he  rallies  you  with  the  cheering  reminder : 
"Hurrah:  the  first  along  the  dew-damp  path  in  the 
morning  {i.e.  the  pioneer)  dries  off  on  his  own  body  the 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


21 


wet  grass,  for  the  benefit  of  those  who  follow  him."  A 
perfect  parable  this  of  grand  old  Livingstone  staggering 
down  South  to  his  Ilala  grave,  for  did  he  not  endure  all 
his  discomforts  that  the  men  following  might  reap  a 
harvest  of  travelling  tranquillity  ?  Hence  the  negro  song, 
dedicated  to  all  pioneers,  which  I  translate  thus — 

"  Lead  thou  the  way  in  the  wet  grass  drear, 
Then,  only  then,  art  thou  pioneer  : 
For  Mr.  First  must  get  all  the  woes, 
That  Mr.  Second  may  find  repose." 

Called  technically  "The  Path-Borer,"  a  pioneer  of  the 
old  school  is  almost  canonised  by  the  negro,  and  all  who 
follow  in  his  wake  are  his  youngsr  brothers.  Even  to 
this  remote  day,  all  around  Lake  Mweru  they  sing  a 
"  Livingstone  "  song  to  commemorate  that  great  "  path- 
borer,"  the  good  Doctor  being  such  a  federal  head  of  his 
race  that  he  is  known  far  and  near  as  Ingeresa,  or  "The 
Englishman."    And  this  is  his  memorial  song — 

"  Ingeresa  who  slept  on  the  waves  {LaJa  pa  3/am), 
Welcome  him,  for  he  hath  no  toes  ! 
Welcome  him,  for  he  hath  no  toes  !  " 

That  is  to  say,  revelling  in  paradox  as  the  negro  does, 
he  seized  on  the  facetious  fact  that  this  wanderinc:  Living- 
stone,  albeit  he  travelled  so  far,  had  no  toes,  i.e.  had 
boots,  if  you  please  ! 

And  as  Livingstone,  so  yourself    Here  it  is,  sitting  in 
the  penumbra  of  the  camp  fire,  you  hear  much  ambiguous 
whispering,  the  changes  all  rung  on  one  wonderful  word 
they  have  coined — your  new  African  name,  nothing  less. 
3 


22 


THINKING  BLACK 


Often  only  a  much  modified  adaptation  of  the  old  one ; 
oftener  still  a  nasty  nickname  for  a  nastier  man,  this 
awful  Africa,  so  unlike  Heaven  from  sea  to  sea,  impudently 
lays  down  the  laughable  law  that  you  must  have  a  new 
name  in  this  land.  The  spade  is  at  last  called  a  spade. 
Without  a  pang  of  pity  they  rob  you  of  your  old 
patronymic,  all  the  Europeans  in  Africa,  like  a  band  of 
burglars,  being  hidden  behind  the  mask  of  an  alias. 
Sorry  to  suggest,  this  just  suits  many  of  the  riff-raff,  for 
as  nobody  is  shy  at  a  masked  ball,  many  a  Portuguese 
under  the  mask  of  a  nom  de  guerre  raided  Lubaland,  his 
identity  lost  in  a  nickname.  Again  and  again  have  I 
been  baffled  in  tracking  such  murderers,'  all  the  fearful 
facts  genuine,  but  minus  the  necessary  name.  So  you 
give  it  up — fooled,  fighting  a  phantom  !  Not  one  new 
name,  mind  you,  but  many ;  for  the  bigger  the  criminal 
the  longer  the  list  of  aliases. 

Mr.  Negro,  too,  like  the  changing  town-names  in  a 
Map  of  Africa,  is  quite  as  bad.  The  changing  man  has 
changing  names.  Here  is  a  lad  at  my  elbow  with  a  pen- 
sive air ;  wants  an  advance  of  pay,  he  says,  to  buy  a  trifle 
— to  buy  a  name,  be  it  known.  This  means  that  a  name 
is  a  serious  part  of  moveable  estate  and  is  as  much  legal 
property  as  his  gun  or  dog :  witness,  this  youngster 
proposing  to  go  shares  with  another  man's  name,  and 
solemnly  buying  it  for  £  s.  d.  And  unconsciously 
quotes  Scripture  in  the  translation  :  "  A  good  name,"  says 
he,  "  is  better  than  riches  ! "  So  he  pays  the  price  and 
gives  the  riches  for  a  good  name.    Of  course,  he  has  one 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


23 


already,  but  opines  that  his  birth-name  is  too  juvenile  ; 
was  it  not  given  him  without  his  permission  and  therefore 
purely  conjectural?  Should  not  a  name  be  an  appro- 
priate photo  of  his  character?  He  alone  knows  that 
name.  So  he  argues  and  so  he  acts,  and  this  is  the 
reason  why  the  question  of  native  names  becomes  a 
perplexity,  a  hate,  and  an  amazement.  For  as  the  ins 
and  outs  of  his  life  go  like  his  river  in  twists  and  turns, 
even  so  each  new  aspect  of  life  means  a  new  name.  In 
this  respect  the  long  sinuous  Congo  has  the  same  history 
as  a  Congo  native,  a  dozen  new  names  for  the  dozen  new 
twists  down  stream.  A  mere  Smith  or  Brown  cannot 
exist  in  these  lands,  for  there  is  the  real  article,  a  Mr. 
Smith  really  worth  the  name  for  he  works  in  iron,  and 
an  equally  real  Mr.  Brown  as  brown  as  a  berry.  No 
wonder,  when  you  tell  the  African  that  in  Heaven  we 
shall  have  a  new  nature,  his  rejoinder  is,  "  Then  we 
must  get  a  new  name."    New  nature  equates  new  name. 

But  the  worst  part  of  this  Benguella  story  is  yet  to 
come. 


I 


CHAPTER  III 
Far,  yet  not  Farthest,  In 


"Atticus!  .  .  .  the  stupidest  and  ugliest  slaves 
come  from  Britain."  Cicero. 


•  •  « 

"  I'm  king  to-day,"  said  the  dying  slave  to  the  king 
who  killed  him. 

•  •  « 

"Here  in  Lubaland  a  goat  costs  four  yards  of 
calico,  and  a  woman-slave  is  also  sold  for  four  yards, 
ergo  a  goat  =  a  woman."  avovo  ( Luban  chief). 


CHAPTER  III 


Far,  yet  not  Farthest,  in 

HEREIN  the  reader  is  invited  to 
call  a  spade  a  spade^  and  return 
a  true  bill  against  Portuguese  slavery^  the 
black  ivory  being  proved  to  carry  the 
white  ivory  out  to  the  Atlantic. 

FOR  here,  in  this  trail  debouching  on  the  seashore 
from  the  Catumbella  Hills,  you  have  the  most 
famous  slave  track  in  Africa — yes !  And  all 
persistently  passing  under  the  nose  of  high  constituted 
authority,  remember.  His  Excellency  the  Governor  is 
there  in  Benguella,  while  beyond  that  dignitary,  away 
far  out  at  sea,  an  occasional  curl  of  blue  smoke  indicates  a 
passing  British  cruiser.  The  port-holes  look  exactly  like 
the  clenched  teeth  of  a  bull-dog  longing  to  bite  the 
Portuguese  slaver.  Yet  the  confusion  and  degradation  of 
thought  is  such  that  for  more  than  a  century  there  has 
been  a  tacit  conspiracy  to  wink  at  it  all.  But  the  God 
Who  has  cursed  the  man  who  winkcth  with  the  eye  is  not 
indeed  mocked,  and  "  Cursed  Catumbella  "  is  the  awful 
alliteration  of  this  sad  story.    For  if  inter-negro  slavery 

27 


28  THINKING  BLACK 

be  a  bad  black  thing,  then  a  fortiori  white  versus  black 
slavery  is  worse.  But  if  high  constituted  authority  winks 
at  it  all,  then,  a  fortissimo,  cursed  is  the  said  Govern- 
ment that  winketh  with  the  eye. 

As  far  as  can  be  done  in  cold  print  let  me  say  what  I 
saw.    My  date  is  in  August,  the  location  a  forest  in 
which  Latitude  12°  South  is  intersected  by  Longitude  21° 
East.    Who  could  ever  forget  the  nightmare  of  this 
monster  slave  caravan  we  meet  in  the  Chokwe  country  ? 
Flying  as  we  both  are  in  opposite  directions  through  the 
hungry  country,  you  are  bewildered  and  exasperated  to 
see  this  staggering  mass  of  captive  humanity  heading  for 
the  West  Coast.    Through  desolate  marshy  lands  have 
they  come  ;  across  the  burning  sands  of  the  Kifumadzi 
flat  have  they  dragged  :  Lunda  and  Luvale  lands  are  now 
passed,  but  the  Ocean  is  still  a  weary  way  off.  Already 
months  on  the  road,  hunger  is  gnawing  at  the  vitals  of 
the  whole  cruel  caravan,  and  dozens  of  hectoring  brutes 
are   clubbing  on   their   "  moving  money "  {olomhongo) 
from  behind.    The  coldest-blooded  creature  south  of  the 
Arctic  circle  could  not  contemplate  that  via  dolorosa 
without  revolt,  for  here  is  the  "  open  sore  "  streaming 
with  life's  blood  before  your  eyes.    Spring  expostulat- 
ingly  on  one  of  these  obese  and  orthodox  slavers  in  the 
forest  and  he  tells  you  with  alacrity  that  the  Portuguese 
buy  them  all  up.    Yea,  further,  with  engaging  frankness 
this  brutal  black  gives  you  the  name  and  address  of 
reputable  merchants  in  Benguella  and  Catumbella  who 
snap  up  as  much  black  ivory  as  possible  :  are  they  not 


FAR,  YET  NOT  FARTHEST,  IN  29 

going  to  ship  them  over  to  San  Thome  for  the  cultivation 
of  cocoa  ? 

Look,  then,  at  this  caravan,  taking  nearly  three  hours 
to  march  past,  a  horde  of  eight  hundred  souls,  all  doomed 
to  exile  for  life.  Some  tottering  old  men  there,  mere 
shrivelled  sacks  of  bones  who  at  any  moment  may 
need  to  lie  down  by  the  roadside  and  die.  Dozens  of 
women  there,  staggering  along  with  little  babies  born 
and  unborn,  for  this  famished  "  hungry  country  "  demands 
a  rushing  speed  for  the  caravan.  Item:  One  mother, 
the  grief-lines  furrowing  her  face,  goaded  on  with  baby 
just  born  that  day  by  the  roadside,  maternity  conval- 
escence, say,  one  hour  and  a  fraction.  Saddest  sight  of 
all,  crowds  of  little  emaciated  boys  and  girls  all  sold  for 
a  song  in  the  Congo  State,  the  little  legs  at  last  giving  out. 
Yet  only  four  months  before  every  one  of  them  had 
radiant  youth  bubbling  in  his  veins.  Who  can  forget 
that,  Lubaus  born  and  bred  as  they  are,  these  same  little 
souls  sing  a  song  in  their  own  country  about  the  joys  of 
a  jaded  piccaninny  on  the  trail  when  nearing  home  at 
last? 

"  If  toiling  on  a  journey  dreary 
A  little  toddling  child  is  weary, 
One  whisper  of  the  magic  '  Home,' 
How  strong  the  little  legs  become  1 
No  longer  weariness  they  feel, 
For  they  are  stiff  like  bars  of  steel." 

But  here  they  are,  far  from  home,  that  long  wriggling 
horror  of  a  slave  track  before  and  behind  them,  so  thin 
and  hollow-eyed  you  can  only  think  of  them  as  a  moan 


30  THINKING  BLACK 

materialised  into  flesh.  Heading  for  the  slave-pen  at 
Benguella  there  is  no  such  magic  word  "  Home"  to  stiflfen 
their  back  in  resolve  to  reach  it.  One  of  these  girls  had 
fallen  behind,  strength  gone,  load  of  rubber  thrown  on 
the  ground,  so,  emerging  from  the  bush,  I  was  just  in  time 
to  see  her  owner  club  her  head,  yelling  out  a  threat  with 
each  stroke.  This  was  more  than  I  could  stand,  and  as 
Christ  saw  nothing  worse  than  that  among  the  Temple 
dove-sellers  I  sprang  at  this  burly  Bihean  with  a  stick  to 
administer  unto  him  a  not  undeserved  trouncing — but  of 
course  he  showed  a  clean  pair  of  heels.  One  tiny  girl  I 
redeemed  from  a  dark  death  by  the  roadside,  a  girl  who 
is  now  a  happy  Christian  mother  on  Lake  Mweru. 

Item :  Literally  sold  for  a  song  was  one  such  little 
boy  whose  name  became  Sikispence,  his  market  value  one 
coloured  handkerchief  at  6d. 

Item:  A  native  named  "Truss  of  calico"  bought  one 
youngster  for  Is.  4d.  ;  a  cheap  chattel  this,  stolen  while 
mother  was  off  in  the  field. 

Item :  Dilunga's  child,  too,  was  sold  for  an  old  water- 
proof coat. 

Item:  Ndala  was  a  boy  who  fetched,  as  market  price, 
a  small  bag  of  corn. 

Item :  Musole  and  her  child  were  also  sold  for  grain, 
two  small  bags  for  two  human  beings.  "  Man  eats  corn, 
but  corn  can  eat  man,"  their  proverb  runs. 

Proof  positive  ?  Here  is  a  blunt  fellow  who  has  done 
the  thing  for  years,  no  Portuguese  he.  Quite  a  prodigy  of 
obesity  for  the  climate,  he  has  bought  and  sold  many  a 


FAR,  YET  NOT  FARTHEST,  IN  31 

slave.  In  his  ample  mouth  there  is  an  ample  pipe,  and 
between  the  puffs  he  boasts  of  his  slave-trading  ;  two 
slaves  for  one  rifle,  is  an  instance.  Committing  himself, 
as  he  did,  to  an  lOU  for  the  accessory  cartridges,  here 
you  have  frank  fact  and  no  fiction.  Daring  to  marry  in 
after  years,  this  union  was  so  degrading  that  when  he 
died,  his  widow,  on  the  18th  of  April  1907,  sold  off  seven 
slaves,  two  going  to  Snr.  "Katavola" — to  give  the  name 
of  place  for  persons.  This  Senhor,  of  course,  offered  good 
prices  for  some  girls  she  had.  Figures  are  not  at  all 
difficult  to  get  at,  for  often  a  blunt  question  receives  as 
blunt  an  answer,  this  especially  with  the  "  old  timer,"  a 
high-and-dry  Tory.  A  slaver  by  principle  as  well  as 
practice,  he  does  not  believe  in  exposing  too  much'  of 
the  white  of  the  eyes  on  this  subject  of  slavery.  With 
Dickens'  policeman  he  believes  that  "  words  is  bosh,"  and 
the  polite  modern  "  servi9aes "  is  too  fancy  a  word  for 
him.  Asked  point-blank  to  give  the  percentage  of  slave 
mortality  en  route  to  ocean,  this  out-and-outer  makes  a 
careful  calculation  of  the  losses.  Far  from  parrying  such 
a  preposterously  pointed  question,  "  Well,"  says  he,  "  they 
vary  a  good  deal  ;  from  some  districts  they  are  hardier 
than  from  others.  If  we  are  lucky  we  may  get  six  out 
of  eveiy  ten  alive  to  Bihe,  and  if  unlucky,  perhaps  only 
three  out  of  ten." 

The  first  draft  of  the  programme  for  our  route  ahead 
is  very  simple.  Two  hundred  miles  inland  is  our  first 
stage  to  the  kingdom  of  Bihe,  and  our  roaming  Bihcan 
is  the  man  who  holds  the  key  to  the  Far  Interior.  The 


32 


THINKING  BLACK 


accurate  African  analogy  is  found  in  thinking  of  Benguella 
as  the  sort  of  Western  Zanzibar,  and  busy  transport  Bihe 
as  the  Unyanyembe  of  these  latitudes.  This  Bihean, 
though,  scores  off  his  Eastern  brother  in  having  more 
commercial  initiative,  whereas  in  the  prowess  of  war — 
"  clash  of  arms "  they  call  it — the  poor  Bihean  is  as 
famous  a  "woman  in  war"  [sic)  as  the  Arab  Rugaruga 
is  a  historic  horror.  The  very  grammar  of  the  story  tells 
this  tale,  for  the  proper  noun  "  Rugaruga "  became 
ultimately  the  proper  verb  (and  improper,  alas  !)  meaning 
"  to  murder  and  loot,"  all  around  Lake  Mweru.  Both  of 
them  professional  slavers,  the  Bihean  in  the  West  found 
himself  in  the  grip  of  a  much  more  keen  economic  process 
than  the  Munyamwesi  man  out  East.  For  unlike  the 
Bihean's  Portuguese  master,  the  fastidious  and  aggressive 
Arab  kept  commerce  in  his  own  hands,  disdaining  a 
delegate.  On  the  other  hand,  the  lethargic  Portuguese 
threw  all  the  initiative  on  the  bold  Bihean,  of  course 
throwing  at  him  at  the  same  time  a  few  hundred  pounds' 
worth  of  guns,  powder,  and  calico.  The  black  factotum 
thus  armed  with  a  curious  power  of  attorney  in  the  form 
of  a  huge  Portuguese  flag  disappeared  "  over  the  hills  and 
far  away"  for  a  nine  months'  pacific  (!)  penetration  of 
the  Interior.  No  sedentary  Portuguese,  as  a  rule,  even 
followed  him  to  ask  nasty  questions,  and  if  the  man  from 
Lisboa  ever  had  any  curiosity  about  the  Interior  it  very 
seldom  seemed  to  have  crystallised  into  active  exploration 
— Silva  Porto  of  Belmonte  the  great  exception.  Thus  it 
came  to  pass  that  in  a  quarter  of  a  century  the  Bihean 


FAR,  YET  NOT  FARTHEST,  IN  33 

legend  spread  far  over  the  Interior,  and  in  the  solemn 
matter  of  slavery  these  "  black  Portuguese  "  became  the 
great  knights  of  industry  in  the  land.  Even  when  a 
young  boy  Bihean  really  finds  his  legs,  off  he  is  drafted 
East,  across  the  Kwanza  River,  to  be  trained  like  a  young 
bull-dog  to  show  his  teeth  at  the  slaves.  At  six  years  of 
age  the  busy  little  commercial  brain  of  Master  Bihean  has 
long  ago  learned  the  market  prices  of  human  flesh  and 
blood,  man-slave,  woman-slave,  child-slave,  and  baby-slave 
all  assorted  and  ticketed  in  his  head. 

At  glad  last — and  thanks  to  kind  Mr.  Woodside — we 
climb  out  of  that  loathsome  littoral  one  lovely  evening  in 
July,  Casting  a  last  long  look  at  the  Western  Atlantic 
disappearing  in  strange  apocalyptic  glow  among  the 
Catumbella  Hills,  ours  it  is  to  take  the  first  faltering 
step  on  our  way.  Not  again  shall  we  sight  the  salt  sea 
until  one  remote  day  the  wide  continent  is  crossed  and 
the  Indian  Ocean  flashes  into  view  at  Chinde.  The 
"  boring  "  of  Africa  is  the  native's  technical  term  for  this 
crossing  from  sea  to  sea.  Working  out  to  the  sea  after 
being  shut  iu  to  the  long  grass  of  the  Interior  for  nearly 
twenty  years,  the  first  snifi"  of  the  Ocean  ozone  dilates 
the  nostrils  with  the  subtlest  of  all  human  joy — the 
prickly  breath  of  the  salt  sea  driving  deep  down  into 
the  panting  lungs.  Louder  than  the  thousand  Greeks 
of  Xenophon  you  can  utter  the  long-pent-up  shout, 
"  Thalatta  !    Thalatta  !  "  on  sighting  the  great  green  sea — 

"  The  ."^ca  !  the  sea  !  the  open  sea  ! 
The  blue,  the  fresh,  the  ever  free ! " 


34  THINKING  BLACK 

The  climb  up  to  Bihe  is  the  first  stage  of  our  long 
journey,  and  the  three  opening  days  see  us  covering  a 
curious  switchback  arrangement  in  mountains,  the  Ekonga 
and  Kanyon  presenting  the  worst  difificulties.  Probably 
a  section  view  of  the  former  might  show  eight  rude 
angles  of  nearly  70°,  and  until  the  ridge  of  Mount  Elonga 
is  gained  on  the  seventh  day  and  an  altitude  of  5000  feet 
reached,  it  is  persistent  ascent  all  the  time,  the  chill  tonic 
mountain  air  biting  the  cheek.  We  cross,  too,  numberless 
little  perennial  streams  spanned  by  bridges,  both  creaking 
and  rickety,  and  only  two  rivers  of  any  magnitude — the 
Bailombo  and  Keve.  The  Bailombo,  the  size  of  an 
English  trout-stream,  is  fairly  fordable ;  the  Keve,  a  deep 
rapid  thing,  you  must  negotiate  in  a  leaky  little  bark 
boat  (coracle,  rather) — one  man,  one  voyage.  You  feel  as 
safe  as  if  you  had  put  to  sea  in  a  washtub,  and  about  as 
dry.  But  to  have  a  lively  sense  of  the  saving  humour  of 
things  is  one  thing,  and  to  indulge  that  same  sense  half- 
way across  this  washtub  voyage  is  quite  another.  You 
recall  the  old  saying  that  "  a  sailor  has  never  got  home 
till  he  has  had  his  dinner,"  and  a  slip  between  this  cup 
of  a  canoe  and  that  lip  of  a  river  bank  is  a  daily,  deadly 
occurrence.  If  ever  there  was  nothing  in  a  name,  here 
you  have  it  in  this  bark  bundle  called  a  boat.  Too  truly 
you  embark.  That  bright  red  shell  cracked  all  over  and 
puttied  with  mud  proclaims  this  to  be  her  maiden  voyage, 
so  be  sure  of  it  the  whole  situation  is  abounding  in 
ludicrous  possibilities.  Squeezing  into  the  thing,  you 
wonder  desolately  where  your  negro  paddler  can  contrive 


FAR,  YET  NOT  FARTHEST,  IN  35 

to  come  in  ;  already,  sufficient  unto  the  canoe  is  the  cargo 
thereof.  Truly  a  trial  trip !  But  if  he  cometh  not  this 
cargo  goeth  not,  so  our  funny  friend  lurches  in  feet  first, 
the  intelligent  idea  being  that  if  these  really  frightful  feet 
find  room  his  meagre  body  can  easily  follow.  Already 
filling  fast  before  you  start,  you  are  almost  as  wet  as  the 
traditional  drowned  rat,  and  away  you  wobble  on  the 
river.  The  water  is  now  as  much  in  the  boat  as  the  boat 
in  the  water.  Circling  in  many  a  creditable  curve,  you 
long  "to  be  over  yonder,"  a  negro  glued  to  your  back,  a 
brand-new  boat  and  a  brand-new  experience.  It  is  a 
remarkable  fact — and  fact  it  is — that  old  Kasonkomona, 
on  the  Lufira,  used  regularly  to  capsize  his  canoe  at  the 
precise  point  where,  on  the  morrow,  he  would  dive  for  the 
lost  treasure — of  course,  after  his  half-drowned  passenger 
was  well  on  his  way  to  the  next  camp.  A  strong 
swimmer,  he  always  dramatically  saved  the  sinking 
voyager,  the  greedy  glitter  in  his  eyes  bespeaking  salvage 
operations  on  the  morrow  —  guns,  spears,  beads,  all 
harvested  from  the  river  bottom. 

Another  detail.  At  each  of  our  camps  we  are  forced, 
gipsy-like,  to  build  a  culinary  Ebenezer,  not  one  but  three 
stones  necessary  for  a  pot-rest,  each  new  bivouac  appro- 
priately demanding  its  new  Ebenezer.  "Hither  by  Thy 
help  I  come,"  these  sermonising  stones  seem  to  say  every 
time  the  pot  mounts  the  memorial  heap,  and  looking  away 
back  out  to  the  Ocean  I  see  a  long  row  of  Ebenezers, 
almost  enough  to  build  a  Temple.  That  British  tinsmith 
who  manufactured  my  camp  copper  kettle  little  guessed 


36 


THINKING  BLACK 


what  a  prophetic  touch  he  added  to  his  work  by  graving 
"Ebenezer"  on  its  handle — -the  very  stones  and  cooking- 
pot  crying  out  to  God  in  the  desert.  Indeed,  the  whole 
long  story  can  be  told  in  the  exact  terms  of  Bunyan's 
allegory  :  not  a  mere  playing  at  "  Pilgrim's  Progress,"  for 
we  were  pilgrims  and  we  did  daily  make  progress.  Many 
a  "Hill  Difficulty"  lying  across  our  track;  many  a 
"  Slough  of  Despond,"  too.  Many  a  time  we  laid  up 
stores  of  future  anguish  in  a  supper  of  uncooked  beans. 
Often  and  often  we  braved  the  perils  of  pea-nuts  and  green 
corn  before  turning  in.  Yet  another  handful  of  pea-nuts 
Likewise  a  handful  of  pea-nuts.  And  so  on  and  on. 
Just  that.    On  and  on. 

Then  we  get  on  our  legs.  Break  camp  in  the  silence 
and  solitude  of  the  moonlight,  wide  awake  at  every  pore, 
the  grey  and  ghostly  light  outlining  weird  forms  of  fallen 
trunks  and  decaying  roots.  Ours  the  tip-toe  of  expectancy, 
enjoying  the  two  distinct  thrills  of  a  cool  starry  night 
merging  into  the  reddening  dawn  waking  up  the  forest. 
Mark  you,  only  sixty  minutes  separate  prospective  blaze 
from  present  blackness,  yet  one  hour  hence  these  forest 
glades  glimmering  in  gloom  will  seem  things  of  years 
ago,  a  far-oflf  memory  and  dream.  Have  you  caught  it  ? 
The  mere  minutes  separating  4  a.m.  and  5  a.m.  are  few 
and  flying,  yet  once  again  fancy  fights  facts,  making  each 
of  these  minutes  seem  a  month.  For  the  awful  antithesis 
yawning  between  the  nocturnal  and  the  diurnal,  between 
the  gloom  and  the  glory,  defies  you  to  measure  it  by  mere 
minutes.    The  antagonism  is  too  abysmal.    It  is  like 


FAR,  YET  NOT  FARTHEST,  IN  37 

getting  up  in  December  to  break  your  fast  in  June.  Even 
the  negro  has  caught  the  identical  idea  when  by  way  of 
sunrise  greeting — his  way  of  saying  "  Good  morning  ! " 
this — he  puts  to  you  the  phrase,  "  A  night's  a  year ! " 
The  ghostly  gloom  is  now  a  gleaming  palace  of  life, 
and  the  eerie  stillness  of  the  night  is  blotted  into 
oblivion  by  the  million  cries  of  the  morning.  The  battle 
of  the  day  resumes. 

So  on  and  in  we  go.  Picture  our  pleasure  on  finding 
at  Bailundu  and  Bihe  a  splendid  type  of  mission  worked 
by  our  friends  the  Americans.  Pioneered  by  one  of  the 
"  Bible "  Bagsters,  how  suggestive  that  the  family  that 
flooded  England  with  Bibles  should  also  have  sent  out 
a  living  epistle  to  Africa.  Messrs.  Sanders,  Stover,  Fay, 
Woodside,  and  Currie  were  men  both  winning  and  wise, 
and  they  fought  slavery  here  at  its  hard  headquarters. 
No  wonder  the  Portuguese  were  exasperated,  for  as  you 
drew  near  these  glad  little  centres  of  testimony,  while 
yet  a  long  way  off  you  could  hear  the  Missionaries'  names 
fondled  as  a  household  joy ;  the  names  "  Sandle "  and 
"  Kole "  being  passwords  that  work  like  magic.  The 
same  old  song  this,  we  ourselves  afterwards  found  in 
the  Garenganze.  For,  in  the  teeth  of  many  a  hard- 
mouthed  denial  from  white  men,  the  Missionary,  having 
advanced  the  claim  that  the  African  has  as  soft  a  heart 
as  his  body  is  tough,  must  perforce  prove  his  point.  And 
according  to  his  faith  on  this  "  negro  heart"  subject,  even 
so  is  it  unto  him.  Mr.  Missionary  wins  the  hearts  of  the 
whole  countryside,  and  that,  too  often,  to  the  chagrin  of 


38  THINKING  BLACK 

his  resident  officials.  I  had  an  amusing  debate  with  an 
exalted  personage  on  this  very  tender  subject,  the  dialogue 
being  as  short  as  sharp. 

"  Why  have  you  Missionaries  all  the  natives  around 
your  Mission  Station,  and  the  Government  scarcely  any  ? " 

"  The  Government  say  '  Allez  ! '  and  the  Mission  says 
'Allons!'" 


CHAPTER  IV 
Our  African  Apprenticeship 


"And  Moses  sent  messengers  to  the  king  of  Edom : 
Let  us  pass,  I  pray  thee,  through  thy  country :  we 
will  not  pass  through  the  fields,  neither  will  we 
drink  of  the  wells :  we  will  go  by  the  king's  high  way, 
we  will  not  turn  to  the  right  hand  nor  to  the  left, 
until  we  have  passed  thy  borders." 

Numbers  xx.  17. 
*  » 

"And  he  said,  Thou  shalt  not  go  through.  And 
Edom  came  out  against  him  with  a  strong  hand. 
Thus  Edtm  refused  to  give  Israel  passage  through 

his  border."  Numbers  xx.  20,  21. 

«  «  « 

"A  famous  man  is  Robin  Hood  .  .  . 
And  Scotland  has  a  thief  as  good, 
An  outlaw  of  as  daring  mood ; 
She  has  her  brave  Rob  Roy." 


4* 


CHAPTER  IV 


Our  African  Apprenticeship 

HE  RE  AT  the  reader  yawns  at 
African  delays,  and  discovers 
that  patience  must  be  his  pet  virtue  in 
this  lazy  land. 

POOR  old  gin-soaked  Bihe !  There  it  was  Joseph 
Lynn,  young  Dr.  Sparks,  and  others  in  later  days 
poured  out  their  lives  for  the  land.  Paul-like, 
ready  to  be  accursed  rather  than  not  save  souls  ;  Knox- 
like,  ready  to  die  unless  God  give  him  his  Scotland. 
There  are  few  who  have  done  so  much,  and  talked  so  little, 
as  these  dear  martyrs,  battling  on  in  hard  Bihe  among 
drink-sodden  slavers.  But  we  restrain  ourselves,  and 
laying  our  wreaths  upon  their  graves  pass  on. 

That  cry  of  Grog  !  Grog  !  Grog  !  Not  content  with 
their  thriving  export  slavery,  the  Portuguese  resolved 
to  make  sure  of  this  bad  business  by  forging  a  second 
slave-chain  of  rum,  vulgarly  called  "  nigger  killer."  And 
soon  Bihe  began  to  fill  up  with  gin-distillers,  every  other 
little  stream  boasting  its  hell-trap.  The  liquid  sold  was 
such  wicked  stuff  that  it  could  almost  corrode  a  paving- 
stone — what  then  happened  to  the  negro  ?    Result,  a 


42  THINKING  BLACK 

blear-eyed  Biliean  who  would  sell  his  soul  and  his  family 
to  get  a  drink. 

Quadrupeds  first,  of  course ;  then  follow  the  reluctant 
bipeds,  one,  two,  three  fashion.  Oh  yes,  he  pauses  in 
the  process,  for  he  likes  his  family,  but  likes  the  fire-water 
best.  He  even  fights  the  temptation  for  a  week,  then  all 
is  lost  as  the  first  flow  of  liquor  stings  its  way  down  the 
alimentary  canal,  tearing  at  his  vitals.  Wipes  his  lips 
now  with  the  back  of  his  hand  and — and  starts  to  sell  the 
family.  No  wonder  Scripture,  away  back  at  the  beginning 
of  the  world,  kindles  for  Africa  such  a  beacon  of  wild 
warning  when  it  reveals  the  negro's  ancestor  naked  in 
his  tent,  and  drink  the  cause  of  it  all. 

No  wonder  the  pawky  English  tongue  insists  that  gin 
=  an  inebriant  and  gin  =  a  trap.  In  Bihe,  the  sovereign 
specific,  when  the  supply  of  slaves  languishes,  is  the  rum 
business.  Here  it  is  that  slaves  are  "  made  to  order "  ; 
slaves  literal,  I  mean,  as  well  as  slaves  moral.  A  man  ran 
in  to  one  of  our  Missionaries  and  said  that  his  father  had 

sold  his  own  son  for  rum,  sold  to  Senr.  .    First  enslaved 

morally  by  his  "fire-water"  thirst,  the  next  move  was 
one  of  frank  literal  slavery  ;  sold  his  own  flesh  and  blood 
for  the  fiery  fluid.  Such  a  sure  source  of  enslavement 
is  this,  that  the  commoner  w^ile  is  to  advance  sundry 
"modest  quenchers"  on  credit,  the  sure  slavery  of  thirst 
ultimately  demanding  a  deal  in  slaves  for  liquidation  of 
the  liquor  bill.  Take  Senr.  Z.  of  Ohwa ;  he  gave  one 
Bihean  just  enough  drink,  not  only  to  drown  the  man's 
wits,  but  also  to  drown  the  drinker  at  the  Kunehe  River 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  43 

crossing.  Remorseless  as  destiny,  down  swoops  this  gin- 
seller  on  the  drowned  victim's  next-of-kin,  claiming  his 
pound  of  flesh.  And  gets  it,  too,  in  two  qualities  :  flesh 
of  man  and  flesh  of  beast,  an  ox  and  a  slave,  Katumwa 
his  name.  History  is  silent  on  how  these  bereaved 
Biheans  weathered  the  financial  sea,  for  if  they  borrowed 
the  slave  they  would  need  to  pay  two  for  one.  Kapapelo, 
their  gin-drunk  nephew,  lost  his  balance  and  was  drowned 
for  it ;  here  is  a  Portuguese  —  reader,  forgive  the 
sneer ! — resolved  not  to  lose  his  credit  balance  at  any 
rate.^ 

A  weaker  word  than  "fascinating"  would  therefore 
describe  the  Portuguese  methods  in  Bihe  and  farther  East. 
1  Dominating  and  dwarfing  all  other  issues  is  the  Fort,  and 
round  the  average  Commandant  you  have  a  ring  of 
I  rascals,  "  Ovimbali,"  white  man's  personnel.    "  No  one 
i  hearing,  one  cannot  speak,"  so  said  Cicero  long  ago,  and 

I  so  say  these  hangers-on  who  buy  and  sell  justice  to  the 

II  highest  bidder.  Not  a  mere  case  this  of  "  having  the 
I  ear "  of  their  master ;  they  are  his  ears  and  they  are  his 
I  mouth.  Coleridge  described  it  all  unerringly  when  he 
I  said  that  "a  dwarf  sees  farther  than  the  giant  when  he 
I  has  the  giant's  shoulder  to  mount  on."  Hemmed  in  by 
1  injustice  of  this  sort,  the  wise  native  is  the  man  who 

t  |i  sanely  and  shrewdly  steers  clear  of  it  all.  Kan  was 
of  li  one  such,  and  wronged  though  he  was,  he  snapped  his 
nc  I  fingers  at  it  all  :  "  Why  should  1  go  to  the  Fort  for  help 
d's  I  against  the  Fort  ?    Why  go  to  the  Chefe  ?    Is  it  worth 

See  Mr.  Swau  in  The  Slavery  oj  To-Daij  for  sub.-tjxutial  corroboration. 


44 


THINKING  BLACK 


while  to  ask  the  river  to  champion  your  cause  against  the 
lake,  when  you  can  only  get'  water  from  either  ?  " 

The  Kofwali  case  will  illustrate  Fort  methods,  and 
establishing  as  it  does  a  really  regrettable  precedent  we 
must  hoist  a  danger  signal.  The  thunders  of  the  law 
roared  on  poor  Kofwali's  head  because  in  his  own  person 
he  dared  to  confess  to  being  the  nephew  of  a  man  who 
when  alive  was  the  neighbour  of  a  man  who  had  com- 
mitted the  crime.  Judgment :  that  the  said  Kofwali, 
nephew  of  the  neighbour  of  the  accused,  be  fined  two 
slaves,  one  ox,  and  trade  goods  thrown  in.  The  coloured 
sergeant  got  one  slave  for  settling  the  crime,  the  claimant 
had  the  other  slave,  the  white  ofiicer  who  had  given  the 
man  a  severe  beating  with  the  chicotte  got  the  ox  for 
his  exertions,  and  the  soldier  some  of  the  trade  goods  for 
feeding  him  whilst  he  was  a  prisoner,  as  such  are  not  fed 
free  in  the  Fort. 

But  the  hateful  exigencies  of  this  story  demand  an 
ugly  realism.  That  this  foul  official  often  falls  foul  of 
the  Seventh  Commandment  is  too  glaringly  undeniable. 
Mr,  Swan's  facts  are  unarguable  and  must  really  be 
repeated  to  mark  the  depths  of  disgrace  to  which  some 
sink,  A  woman's  child  is  at  the  Fort  and,  straight  as  a 
needle  to  the  pole,  that  woman  heads  for  her  bairn  ;  of 
course,  under  the  escort  of  a  friendly  native  who  is  due 
there  on  a  visit.  Here  at  headquarters  the  woman  is 
seduced  by  the  Commandant,  and  here,  too,  a  roar  of 
rage  is  heard  from  the  official's  own  paramour.  Alas 
for  prestige  !    Now  begins  a  Billingsgate  broil,  concubine 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  45 


versus  Commandant,  the  legal  lion  bearded  in  his  own 
den  by  his  own  negress  consort.  Piqued  by  the  storm 
in  his  own  household,  the  Chefe  calmly  seeks  a  scape- 
goat and  finds  it  in  the  harmless  escort  who  courteously 
brought  the  mother  after  her  child.  Chuckling  with  malice 
and  determined  to  come  out  of  it  with  colours  flying,  the 
Judge  on  the  bench  (who  should  have  been  prisoner  at 
the  bar)  condemned  the  scapegoat  to  pay  two  slaves, 
because — I  quote — he  having  brought  the  woman  and 
the  woman  having  tempted  His  Honour  the  Judge,  there- 
fore judgment  must  be  entered  accordingly. 

But  the  really  profitable  part  of  this  bad  business  is 
"  the  runaway  slave  "  department.  Here  you  have  stay- 
at-homes  who  often  make  more  out  of  it  than  the  zealous 
man-hunters  of  Lubaland.  Take  Senr.  Z.,  for  instance,  and 
work  out  with  him  this  spicy  little  sum  in  slave  arith- 
metic. Problem — how  .  to  make  one  slave  produce 
twenty-three  other  slaves  plus  oxen,  rubber,  and  pigs 
thrown  in.  Now  this  subterfuge  is  really  as  simple  as  it 
is  common,  for  he  sets  the  ball  a-rolling  by  so  maltreating 
this  one  slave  that  run  away  she  must,  and  now  woe  to 
all  who  harbour  her !  She  darts  into  a  hamlet,  and 
breathlessly  elated,  Snr.  Z.  darts  after  her,  for  that  townlet 
must  pay,  yes,  cash  down,  ten  slaves  plus  ten  ipaho  {i.e. 
any  other  legal  currency).  Our  peppery  old  colonial  rubs 
his  hands  with  glee  at  this  brisk  business,  but  he  is  on  for 
more.  (Reader,  are  you  working  out  this  sum  in  awful 
arithmetic  :  one  slave  has  now  captured  ten  more, 
including  etceteras  ?)    Next  move  is  nothing  new,  the 


46  THINKING  BLACK 

same  old  bait  slave  is  going  to  catch  more.    K  is  the 

man  who  is  next  mulcted,  and  he  pays  one  young  woman, 
a  pig,  and  a  load  of  rubber  ;  business  is  not  so  brisk,  you 
see.    There  is  better  fishing  farther  on,  however,  and  the 
village  of  Lak  pays  up  two  slaves,  two  oxen,  and  two  loads 
of  rubber,  all  on  the  vile  old  plea  of  harbouring  Onesimus. 
Can  we  not  now  strike  the  grand  total  and  get  done  with 
it  ?    No,  we  must  include  a  closing  (?)  item.    Farther  along 
there  was  an  open  gateway,  and  this  hunted-down  slave 
darts  in,  only  to  doom  the  villagers  to  a  final  fine — ten 
slaves,  cash  down  !    Now  you  may  strike  your  terrible 
total.    Twenty-three  slaves  plus  two  oxen  plus  one  pig 
plus  three  loads  of  rubber  for  one  runaway  slave.  Plain 
arithmetic  all  this,  not  rhetoric.    Deduction  :  The  Portu- 
guese put  a  premium  on  the  maltreatment  of  slaves. 
Therefore  the  old  specious  pro-slavery  argument,  running 
"The  man  who  treats  his  horse  badly  is  a  fool,"  etc.,  this 
argument,  I  say,  is  as  rotten  as  is  the  audacious  analogy 
between  a  horse  and  a  human  being. 

But  there  is  worse  to  come.  Take  another  vile 
expedient  having  the  same  sad  objective,  I  mean,  the 
swelling  of  this  Westward-going  stream  of  slavery  : 
the  "  Shylock  system  "  among  the  natives.  Here  is  the 
trader's  chance,  and  the  borrowing  native  is  soon  involved 
in  a  quagmire  of  trouble,  to  wit,  a  1000  per  cent  extortion 
on  the  borrowed  goods.  (Not  an  E.O.E.  invoice,  by 
any  means,  for  this  arrogant  Shylock  never  makes  an 

error  and  never  omits  anything.)    Snr,           is  a  case  in 

point  :  as  usual,  he  does  not  want  his  calico  back,  he  wants 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  47 

payment,  not  in  cash  but  kind,  and  that  kind  the  best 
kind,  yea,  the  human  kind.  Therefore  this  knave  grabs 
at  nine  women  as  against  his  debt  for  goods,  an  account 
this  the  natives  stoutly  refuse  to  pay  because  they  have 
already  'paid  it  in  blood — be  it  noted  the  blood  of  the 
bulleted  debtor,  killed  by  Shylock.  Appealing  to  the 
Fort,  the  Chefe  votes  for  his  compatriot  creditor,  arguing 
that  as  Shylock  has  spilled  the  said  blood  a  few  miles 
beyond  the  Fort's  jurisdiction,  obviously  the  deed  must  be 
ignored  and  the  nine  slaves  retained  for  the  debt.  Mark 
you,  here  you  have  blood  shed  and  blood  winked  at.  The 
Sekeseke  case  is  akin  to  this  :  a  gentleman  he,  known  to 

his  Catumbella  friends  as  Senhor  P  B  .  Beating 

a  slave  for  days  into  a  pitiful  pulp,  of  course  the  said  slave 
died,  and  was  buried  at  midnight  in  the  corner  of  his 

garden.    Was   Senhor  P  B  punished  for  this 

murder,  and  if  so,  when,  and  where,  and  by  whom  ?  Now 
for  the  swing  of  the  pendulum. 

Not  that  such  slaves  learning  from  such  masters  are 
much  better  :  how  could  they  be  ?  Pouring  into  Bihe  as 
these  streams  of  slaves  do,  here  in  the  villages  you  have 
the  great  mixing  bowl  of  West  Africa  ;  and  a  slave  in  a 
few  years  takes  on  the  Umbundu  polish,  aping  their 
twang  of  speech  to  a  nicety,  but  tripping  to  the  last  over 
an  M  =  V.  Will  say  Monjo  for  Voujo,  and  so  forth. 
Inter-negro  slavery,  however,  is  here  seen  to  be  a  humaner 
thing  ;  at  least,  the  slave  gets  a  curious  chance  among  his 
own  colour.  Indeed,  the  ascendancy  of  many  of  these 
freedmen  is  all  very  like  a  page  of  Gibbon,  a  master  often 


48 


THINKING  BLACK 


being  indebted  to  his  slave  in  the  meeting  of  his  lawsuit 
liabilities.    For  like  all  "woman"  tribes  who  dread  blood- 
spilling,  the  great  Bihean  terror  (and  substitute  for  blood) 
is  this  network  of  Ovimhu  =  lawsuits,  the  curious  compli- 
cations arising  being  a  prize  conundrum  in  jurisprudence. 
Certainly  if  colour  has  ever  been  given  to  the  statement 
that  slavery  has  something  good  in  it,  the  most  specious 
side  is  the  domestic  servitude.    It  is  a  bold  assertion  to 
make,  but  such  is  the  equipoise  of  events  that  it  may  be 
asserted  that  the  average  chief  is  almost  on  a  par  with 
the  average  slave.    Rex  sleeps  on  the  same  sort  of  reed 
mat  as  his  Onesimus  :  Rex  drinks  the  same  beer  :  Rex 
wears  the  same  apology  for  a  garment,  and  eats  the  same 
sundown  supper  of  mush.    Nay,  the  scales  go  tilt  on  the 
wrong  side,  for  often  at  nightfall  a  slave  slips  in  a  red- 
legged  partridge  or  parakeet  to  his  guidwife ;  contrast 
the  chief  who  has  gone  to  sleep  on  vegetables,  and  his 
slave  sneaking  a  late  game  supper  !    The  same  abundance 
of  firewood,  too,  for  master  and  bondsman  alike  ;  same 
cooking  utensils ;  same  blend  of  tobacco,  with  a  communistic 
whiff  from  the  same  gourd  pipe.    Flowing  like  a  tide,  the 
royal  slaver  pours  into  my  left  ear,  defying  me  to  gainsay 
the  fact  that  his  slaves  are  freer  than  their  lord  :  "  Has 
not  a  slave  only  one  master,  and  is  not  a  king  servant  of 
all  ? "    Besides,  the  slave  has  a  hidden  weapon  all  the 
time  in  the  institution  of  OkulitumhiJca,  i.e.  the  choice  of 
any  master  lie  chooses.    Here  is  an  instance  where  a 
leathery-lunged   slave,  "  The   Creator,"  they  call  him, 
yawned  and  said  he  had  had  quite  enough  of  his  master's 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  49 


insolence.  So  casting  around  him,  he  picks  out  as  ideal  a 
master  as  he  can  find,  gravely  goes  across  to  this  new 
master's  spirit  temple  and  breaks  one  of  the  sacred  gourds, 
thereby  snapping  the  old  chain  and  welding  a  new.  Does 
not  the  owner  of  the  broken  spirit  chalice  claim  the  slave 
as  damages  ?  Law  :  Damage  an  article  and  the  damager 
pays  himself  in  as  damages.  But  one  day  will  see  his 
boldest  stroke  of  all.  For,  quickly  accumulating  a  small 
capital,  this  slave  awaits  the  day  when  he  sees  his  master 
in  financial  straits,  and  forthwith  turns  the  tables  on  his 
lord,  actually  buying  up  his  own  taskmaster. 

Now  for  the  darkest  despotism  in  all  slavery  ;  I  mean, 
the  ex-slave  ruling  the  ex-lord  with  an  iron  rod.  And  all 
this  according  to  that  most  ancient  of  sayings  passed 
along  in  whispers  from  one  bondsman  to  another :  "  If 
thou  art  an  anvil,  be  patient,  0  slave  my  brother ;  but 
if  thou  art  a  hammer,  strike  hard  !  "  One  such  ex-slave, 
called  "  The  Python,"  ultimately  lorded  it  over  our  huge 
caravan,  and  instead  of  being  abashed  at  his  slave  blood, 
he  was  precious  proud  of  it :  "0  white  man,  you  are 
proud  of  your  descent,  but  I  am  proud  of  my  ascent, 
was  his  idea.  Coleridge  it  was  who  wrote  of  "the  pride 
that  apes  humility,"  and  our  friend  "  The  Python  "  had  it, 
for  if  not  pride  of  race  it  was  pride  of  place.  But  make 
it  n  rule  never,  oh !  never  to  argue  with  such  a  fellow — if 
you  fight  with  a  sweep  you  cannot  blacken  him,  but  he 
may  blacken  you.  Tantalising  though  he  often  was  and 
worthy  a  well-merited  wigging,  there  he  stood,  head  and 
shoulders  above  them  all,  a  go-ahead  boss  just  "  up  from 


50 


THINKING  BLACK 


slavery."  He  did  not  cringe  to  us,  and  did  not  mind 
running  risks  with  his  bread-and-butter.  Wise,  too,  with 
a  corrosive  sort  of  wisdom,  some  things  he  said  were  a 
clever  echo  of  Epictetus  (and  who  by  the  by  was  he,  if 
not  a  slave  ?).  Even  Horace  would  pardon  me  for  calling 
him  eloquent.  (Horace,  too,  who  was  he  if  not  a  slave's 
son  ?)  Yet  this  man  finally  became  as  tame  as  a  friendly 
mastiff,  although  all  the  time  a  snob  to  his  fellows.  And 
a  slave  snob,  remember,  is  king  of  all  the  snobs  ;  proves  it, 
too,  by  kissing  the  feet  of  the  man  above  him  on  the 
social  ladder,  while  he  kicks  the  other  who  is  below  him. 
Himself  a  slave  by  purchase  and  with  a  commercial 
instinct  quite  in  accord  with  the  best  traditions  of  Bihe, 
he  would  sell  his  own  father  and  mother  for  an  old  song. 
Q.E.D.  :  The  Romans  were  right,  "  As  many  slaves,  so 
many  enemies  " — bad  slavery  makes  a  bad  slave. 

Why  forget  that  for  two  centuries  and  a  half  the 
Mamelukes  or  white  slaves  of  Egypt  ruled  in  luxury 
farther  North  ?  Slaves  though  they  were,  did  they  not 
excel  in  art  and  poetry  ?  In  later  Rome,  too,  what  about 
the  educated  slaves  who  earned  large  profits  as  writers, 
lecturers,  bankers,  physicians,  and  architects  ? 

But  all  this  is  not  lost  time,  for  these  days  of  delay  in 
Bihe  are  really  full  of  African  apprenticeship.  Pushing 
on  alone  as  I  had  done,  Mr.  Currie  kindly  gave  me 
sanctuary  in  his  little  mud  cabin  at  Chisamba,  and  many 
a  happy  day  we  spent  together.  Dieted  on  raw  native 
mush  and  beans,  this  good  man  (by  calling  a  Missionary, 
and  by  necessity  everything)  was  the  Canadian  outpost 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  51 


of  our  American  friends.    Here,  all  alone,  he  camped  on 

the  edge  of  a  wood,  making  a  beginning  by  felling  tall 

trees  and  roughing  out  of  the  thick  bush  a  clearing  for  his 

future  site.    Soon  the  songs  of  the  wind  whistling  through 

the  woods  were  answered  by  the  songs  of  Zion,  and  thus 

at  long  last  the  story  of  centuries  of  heathendom  was 

ended  and  a  new  chapter  begun.    The  large  modern 

Chisamba  of  these  later  days  was  long  ago  cradled  there 

in  that  tiny  mud  hut  in  the  woods,  and  I  should  be 

insolently  ungrateful  were  I  to  forget  these  early  days  of 

promise,  eyes  ranging  over  the  Eastern  skyline, 

"  Yearning  for  the  large  excitement 
That  the  coming  years  would  bring." 

But  the  negro  must  really  be  seen  in  his  own  compact 
and  cramped  stockade  town,  and  I  shall  never  regret 
beginning  my  life  in  Africa  in  one  such  village  on  the 
Kunje  River.  Cooped  up  inside  the  same  stockade,  air 
stale  and  sour,  we  black  and  white  lived  together  for 
months,  the  same  beehive  huts  and  porridge  our  portion. 
"  Chenda,"  or  Pilgrim  Town,  they  called  the  village,  and  a 
kindly  old  grandmother  saw  to  my  comfort.  Feeble  and 
wrinkled,  this  genial  body  was  only  one  of  the  withered 
old  "  hags  "  of  the  modern  explorer's  book  of  travels,  yet 
as  the  days  passed  and  we  got  on  family  talking  terms, 
here  was  a  seemingly  repellent  old  negress  developed  into 
a  charming  dowager  armed  to  the  finger  tips  with  finish 
and  polish.  Listened  to  your  verb  Ndu  Pandula  (Thank 
you)  with  a  pretty  pleased  old  blush.  With  her  old  hard, 
corrugated  hands  she  stirred  my  porridge  day  by  day 


52 


THINKING  BLACK 


cooking  all  the  meals  with  the  alacrity  of  a  girl  in  her  teens. 
Beaming  with  simple  truth,'  the  more  this  old  lady  talks 
the  more  the  scales  of  prejudice  fall  from  your  eyes,  and 
you  begin  to  see  her  striking  resemblance  to  some  English 
lady  you  have  known. 

In  Lubaland  I  met  another  such  dear  granny  whose 
intention  was  better  than  her  attainment.  A  beaming 
lady,  seventy  at  a  guess,  she  claims  to  be  the  champion 
cook  of  the  country  ;  tells  yon,  moreover,  that  she  is  the 
Chief's  cook.  Proof  positive  this,  that  being  Chief  s  cook 
she  is  chief  cook  also.  Has  cooked  in  her  day  all  manner 
of  messes  :  fat  snakes,  soft  snails,  and  many  another  menu 
item  that  would  look  more  polite  in  French  than  in 
English.  Boiled  dogs,  she  tells  me,  are  her  speciality,  and 
according  to  this  authority  the  Lubans  pet  their  famous 
dogs  for  the  greedy  reason  that  the  very  dog  that  was  so 
friendly  before  he  entered  the  cooking-pot  might  still 
agree  with  them — in  digestion.  Well,  this  kindly  dame 
it  was  who  came  poking  around  my  pots  and  pans,  em- 
boldened by  her  "Royal  Letters  Patent"  to  believe  that 
she,  poor  soul,  could  even  cook  a  dainty  dish  for  "  he  of 
the  boots."  Finally,  my  boy  gave  me  hopelessly  away, 
by  hinting  that  I  ate  eggs,  a  very  debased  sort  of  diet 
to  a  Luban,  for  in  that  egg  is  not  the  chick  yet  unborn  ? 
(And  if  wc  must  eat  eggs  then,  ex  hypo.,  why  not  wait 
until  they  are  just  old  enough  to  hint  that  there  is  a 
semblance  to  a  chick  inside  ?)  My  boy,  however,  coming 
to  the  point  with  praiseworthy  directness  in  two  terse, 
patronising  words  condescended  to  tell  this  Chief-because- 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  53 

Chiefs  cook  that  she  had  merely  to  break  the  shell  and 
the  thing  was  cooked  in  a  minute.  So  away  trotted  my 
Queen  of  all  the  cooks,  this  and  this  only  ringing  in  her 
ears  as  a  kind  of  key  to  the  new  recipe,  I  mean  the  advice 
to  break  the  shell.  And  break  it  she  did.  But  watch 
with  what  kindly  concern  she  washes  that  shell — and 
what  do  you  think  ?  In  best  cocksure  manner  she  now 
gets  a  stout  stick,  smashes  it  up  shell  and  yolk  together, 
the  resultant  omelette  being  studded  all  over  with  jagged 
shells  sticking  out  like  carpet  tacks.  Nor  did  she  succeed 
in  putting  us  oflF  eggs.  "Emperors'  diet,"  we  call  them, 
even  in  Africa's  dirtiest  hole,  for  when  the  negro  manioc 
palls,  when  their  meat  is  tainted,  when  the  cooking  oil  is 
rancid,  every  time  you  crack  the  shell  of  your  breakfast 
egg  in  a  heathen  hovel,  you  equal  the  crowned  heads  of 
Europe. 

But,  as  I  have  already  hinted,  strange  though  such 
doings  seem,  the  doers  thereof  almost  resemble  your 
own  flesh  and  blood,  the  Bihean  peculiarly  so.  This, 
too,  applies  to  the  young  darkies  who  crowd  around ; 
every  lad  of  them  suggests  his  English  "double."  You 
feel  a  bolt  shot  back  in  your  memory,  and  get  quite 
certain  it  is  only  the  lack  of  a  white  collar  and  tie 
causing  them  to  disresemble  their  tow-headed  English 
twin-brothers  Tommy  Jones,  John  Smith,  etc.  Coarse  fat 
pigs  are  the  national  riches,  the  said  snorters  being  also 
the  village  scavengers.  This  killing  of  the  pig  is  a  big 
function  in  the  Bihean  family,  when  there  is  quite  an  in- 
fectious quiver  in  the  air,  and  he  is  gobbled  utterly  up. 


54  THINKING  BLACK 

The  roar  of  the  rejoicing  is  such  that  they  even  beat  the 
Chicago  packer's  boast  that  everything  about  the  pig  is 
tinned  except  the  squeal.  Yea,  they  surpass  even  the 
America  that  is  great  in  all  things,  great  even  in  ex- 
aggeration. For  in  Africa  the  noise  is  so  loud  that  the 
negro  seems  to  have  swallowed  the  squeal  along  with  the 

pig- 
Listen  !    Across  stream  there  goes  the  maddening 

drum,  a  knot  of  young  fellows  having  started  the  music 
as  a  signal  for  the  girls  to  join  them,  this  rub-a-dub  roar 
being  really  a  sort  of  sweetheart's  call.  The  local  crickets 
have  learnt  the  same  trick,  for  that  shrill  cry  from  a 
thousand  cricket  throats  is  merely  the  male  insect  rasping 
his  wings  as  a  reed  instrument  to  attract  the  lady  cricket 
to  his  side.  The  frogs  with  rolling  eye  are  identical,  for 
all  their  mad  croaking  is  merely  Master  Toad  in  yellow 
waistcoat  and  tight  green  trousers  wooing  his  lady  with 
weird  calls  from  the  marsh.  So  Messrs.  Negro,  Cricket, 
and  Toad  are  all  at  the  same  game  on  the  same  night 
around  the  same  marsh ;  all  alike  in  their  resolve  to  use 
the  same  African  moon  with  the  same  noisy  music  for  the 
same  amorous  assignation. 

But  it  is  cruel  to  beat  a  cripple  with  his  own  crutches, 
and  you  must  not  forget  that  this  bewitching  moon  is  the 
negro's  only  candle,  his  only  fleeting  chance  of  an  evening 
out  of  doors.  It  is  not  my  intention  to  argue  here  the 
ethics  of  the  thing,  but  let  us  try  to  understand  before 
we  judge.  Taking  it  all  in,  cause  and  efiect,  condemna- 
tion and  excuse,  who  shall  throw  the  first  stone  ?  The 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  55 


lurking  leopard  or  hyena  forces  him  into  his  few  feet  of 
stuflfy  hut  during  all  the  waning  phases,  so  now  or  never 
is  the  chance  when  it  looms  large  like  a  new  half-crown. 
Right  through  the  night  that  dance  froths  and  bubbles 
along,  the  whole  negro  from  head  to  heels  mad  with  the 
moonlight — the  Devil's  St.  Vitus  dance  ! 

So  ingrained  is  this  jigging  that  even  a  sedate  negro 
convert  to  Christianity  has  still  got  it  in  the  very  bones, 
"dancing  before  the  Lord"  she  would  call  it.  Here  was 
a  thing  to  be  seen  and  never  forgotten,  the  Devil's  jig 
consecrated  to  the  Lord.  The  soul  of  delicacy  and  dis- 
cretion, I  spotted  an  elect  lady  dancing  out  her  Christian 
joy  as  a  solemn  duty,  not  a  smile  in  her  antics,  no  thought 
of  the  burlesque,  yet  to  me,  a  new-comer,  what  a  gazing- 
stock  !  The  amazing,  maddening  mix-up  of  the  prayer  in 
the  heart  and  the  prance  in  the  feet !  Asked  her  what  it 
meant  at  all  at  all,  and  she  quaintly  replied,  "  Oh  !  it  is 
only  praise  getting  out  at  the  toes."  Then  she  actioned 
this  new  idea  to  me — this  praise-getting-out-at-the-toes 
idea,  I  mean.  Making  a  diagram  of  her  own  body,  she 
first  of  all  put  her  hand  over  her  heart  as  indicating 
her  central  source  of  joy — "  the  generator,"  she  called  it. 
Granting  then  a  heart  pulsating  with  joy  ;  with  her  crooked 
old  finger  she  now  traces  on  her  body  two  opposite  thrills 
of  joy,  one  shooting  up  and  through  her  mouth  in  vocal 
praise,  the  other  darting  down  to  her  feet — praise  getting 
out  at  the  toes  in  dancing  !  A  confession  this  with  a 
moral,  surely,  for  how  much  of  God's  joy  is  allowed  to 
evaporate  by  the  mouth  iu  mere  talk  when  it  should 


56 


THINKING  BLACK 


descend  to  the  feet  in  real  walk.  Hamlet's  answer  too 
often  covering  all  results,  "  Words  !    Words  !    Words  !  " 

Again,  1  say,  I  am  glad  I  went  to  school  with  the 
negro  in  his  own  town.  The  mere  globe-trotter  gets  a 
poor  enough  chance  of  getting  to  know  the  real  African. 
It  is  only  here,  stuck  in  amongst  his  own  hovel  huts,  you 
at  last  reach  the  region  of  hard  fact,  and  a  few  months 
of  such  "slumming"  is  worth  years  of  monotonous 
"Station"  life.  On  a  Mission  Station  the  black  boy  is 
often  only  a  false  eager  echo  of  the  white  man,  whereas 
here,  in  his  hamlet,  you  are  verily  chez  lui.  Lying  awake 
for  hours,  note-book  on  pillow,  you  can  listen  to  their 
talk,  talk,  talking,  this  cheeky  chatter  you  hear  being 
the  natural  and  normal  idiom  of  the  native,  not  that 
"wooden  "  Anglo-Bantu  so  common  even  among  Mission- 
aries. True,  for  the  first  few  days  they  are  tongue-tied, 
and  excruciatingly  bored  by  your  spying  presence ;  let  a 
week  pass,  however,  and  then  you  are  truly  and  techni- 
cally "  in."  This  is  what  the  African  means  when  he 
sings  to  the  white  man  the  little  couplet — 

"  Oh,  come  near. 
And  I'll  hear." 

Sleeping  inside  their  fenced  town,  the  awaking  at  sun- 
rise is  a  weird  business.  There  is  no  daily  newspaper  for 
the  daily  dose  of  information,  so  dream-telling  becomes  a 
serious  substitute.  To-morrow's  news,  that  is  to  say,  is 
more  important  to  them  than  the  stale  doings  of  yesterday. 
And  just  as  night  only  blots  out  a  world  to  reveal  a  uni- 
verse, so,  even  so,  dreaming  by  night  is  a  bigger  business 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  57 


than  working  by  day.    For  to  Mr.  Negro  a  dream  is  an 

avant-courier  from  to-morrow,  a  whisper  out  of  eternity 

for  the  guidance  of  men.    Farther  East  I  came  across 

a  proof  of  this.    Coming  out  of  the  grass,  I  met  a  band 

of  solemn-looking  men  with  a  curious  old-world  look  in 

their  faces.    Wonder  of  wonders,  they  were  a  "dream 

embassy,"  said  they  ;  had  travelled  a  long  way  and  were 

afoot  on  a  kind  of  Missionary  journey  from  one  great 

chief  to  another,  his  friend  and  faithful  ally  of  years. 

A  "  dream  embassy,"  mark  you,  God  having  spoken  to 

their  chief  in  a  great  dream ;  and  the  solemnity  of  it  all 

had  so  sunk  into  the  monarch's  soul  that  he  sent  off  these 

Missionaries  of  his  dream  to  warn  his  dear  friend,  a 

brother-king,  of  the  ways  of  God  with  man.    So  serious 

a  thing  is  this  dream-telling  that  they  have  coined  a 

special  verb  {Lotolivela),  "  to  expound  a  dream."    Not  in 

the  temper  of  mere  expediency  did  I  listen  to  their  sacred 

story,  the  negro  tete-a-tete  with  the  Infinite,  men  on  the 

march  for  many  miles,  their  theme,  God  !  God  !  God ! 

Picture  me  there  a  dazed  Missionary  listening  to  these 

dream-tellers  —  listening  and  wondering,  listening  and 

wondering — as  with  uplifted  hands  they  point  skywards 

and  paint  it  all  so  vividly.    Telling  me  of  the  stately 

goings  of  God  in  their  far-away  marsh  ;  how  that  He 

jhallenged  their  king  as  to  his  dignity  ;  how  that  the 

dng  responded  with  his  long  array  of  titles  ;  and  how  that 

he  more  he  vaunted  before  God  the  less  did  his  strength 

>ecome.    Yet  again  and  again  did  God  so  ask  him  who 

e  was,  and  just  so  often  did  their  king  make  this  foolish 
5 


1 


58 


THINKING  BLACK 


boast  of  dignity — only  to  find  his  strength  oozing  out  of 
his  body.  But  just  as  in  painting  light  is  brought  out 
by  shade,  so  this  king  learned  the  secret  of  power  from 
this  very  secret  of  weakness.  For  finally  God  said  He 
would  "make  an  end,"  and  this  word  "end"  was  the 
beginning  of  bliss.  Said  the  monarch  :  "  Kinsj  ?  no  kino: 
am  I,  but  a  worthless  slave.  All  kingship  is  Thine  and 
all  power ! "  Then  it  was  the  wondrous  tide  of  power 
flowed  back  into  his  body  :  the  weakling  now  a  giant ;  the 
abject  a  strong  man  made  strong  out  of  weakness.  Mere 
dream  though  it  was,  it  has  solemnly  crystallised  into 
dogma,  and  here  am  I  a  Missionary  stumbling  across  these 
other  "dream"  Missionaries  in  the  grass.  In  our  zeal 
for  God's  written  record  we  are  too  apt  to  treat  all  this 
as  a  weird  and  doubtful  business — mere  misty  dream. 
Forgetful  of  the  fact  that  God's  own  Book  it  is  that 
declares,  "  in  a  dream  .  .  .  He  openeth  the  ears  of  men." 
Forgetful,  likewise,  that  if  England  does  not  get  these 
divine  dreams  it  is  because  England,  a  land  full  of  Bibles, 
does  not  need  them.  Forgetful,  finally,  that  God  may 
speak  to  those  to  whom  He  does  not  write. 

In  Lubaland,  one  old  man,  "  The  Snuff-maker "  by 
name,  beats  the  whole  land  at  length  of  bair,  and  this 
because  he  has  bound  himself  with  an  oath  never,  never- 
more to  get  his  hair  trimmed.  He  dreamed  a  dream, 
but  the  dream  played  him  false ;  and,  as  the  head  is  the 
dreamer  and  not  the  heart,  he  doomed  his  head  to  the 
endless  rebuff — of  nevermore  visiting  the  barber.  A  great 
punishment,  indeed,  but  so,  too,  had  that  dream  been 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  59 


great,  a  gorgeous  vision  of  royalty  and  riches.  Vividly 
in  his  sleep,  old  Mr.  SnufF-maker  saw  himself  acclaimed 
king  of  the  country,  loud  rang  the  cheers  as  he  ascended 
the  dream-throne,  and  then — then  broke  a  grey  chilly 
dawn  to  undeceive  and  drag  him  down  to  dirt  and  poverty, 
"  a  fiiding  away  inheritance,"  he  calls  it.  But  the  stout 
old  soul  could  not  go  back  on  the  word  that  had  gone 
forth  from  his  lips.  So  the  days  grow  long  and  the  hair 
grows  longer,  but  onward  he  must  go  on  his  unchanging 
way.  What  an  opening  for  me  to  bring  out  my  Gospel 
wares  and  oflfer  this  old  dream-duped  man  "  an  inherit- 
ance that  fadeth  not  away."  His  riches  came  in  a 
dream  and  went  the  way  they  came. 

*  *  * 

To  revert  to  our  stockade  hamlet,  scavengered  by  pigs 
and  vultures.  Your  mode  of  getting  "  in,"  remember,  is 
quite  akin  to  the  way  you  get  into  their  huts.  This 
negro  doorway  is  so  low  that  you  must  double  up  like  a 
half-shut  pocket-knife  before  you  can  effect  an  entrance, 
and  so,  too,  with  the  metaphoric  doorway  of  the  black 
brain.  British  bluff  is  of  no  avail,  and  only  by  stooping 
can  you  wriggle  into  both  Africa  the  land  and  Africa 
the  man.  Now  is  the  time  to  consult  Alice's  famous 
"  book  of  rules  for  shutting  people  up  like  telescopes." 
It  is  the  old  story  of  harvest  gleaning.  Good  gleaners 
must  be  good  stoopcrs  even  in  this  harvest-field  of  black 
beehive  huts.  You  don't  bow  to  the  negro,  but  you 
must  bow  to  his  dwarf  doorway — "  stoop  to  conquer,"  in 
fact.    As  narrow  almost  as  they  are  low,  these  same  door- 


60 


THINKING  BLACK 


ways  of  course  debar  a  hurried  egress.  The  story  goes 
that  the  advent  of  a  rare  white  skin  one  day  caused  a 
stampede  among  the  frightened  female  population,  one 
well-aimed  rush  being  made  for  a  very  narrow  but  very 
inviting  doorway.  Unfortunately  for  some  of  these 
swarthy  bipeds,  a  very  stout  dowager  stuck  fast  in  this 
rat's  hole  entrance,  effectually  blocking  the  ingress  of  her 
sauve  qui  pent  sisters  behind  her.  The  narrator  of  this 
event  in  African  history  relieves  our  anxiety  by  informing 
us  that  the  lady  was  eventually  extricated  from  her 
uncomfortable  position,  and  would  doubtless  personally 
supervise  the  building  of  her  own  front  door  in  future. 
Deduction :  You  dare  not  (because  cannot)  rush  the 
African  town  of  Mansoul. 

To  ask  for  anything  in  the  Portuguese  loaded-revolver 
tone  of  voice  is  to  shut  yourself  out  by  bolts  and  bars, 
and  all  the  facts  and  forces  of  the  negro's  life  will  be  lost 
to  you.  Be  sure  of  it,  to  be  "Farthest  In"  is  a  poor 
enough  thing  if  it  only  applies  to  the  mere  elementary 
geography  of  Central  Africa.  Yet  is  it  a  pathetic  fact 
that  many  a  man  can  live  a  long  life  in  the  land  and 
never  be  really  in  Africa,  and  such  a  man  regularly  reveals 
his  personality  in  the  curiously  candid  confession  :  "  Yes  ! 
I  can  speak  all  right  to  the  native,  but  cannot  catch  what 
he  says."  Now,  where  does  this  land  him  ?  It  means,  of 
course,  that  as  the  years  pass  his  ears  are  shut  to  the 
steady  stream  of  black  speech  that  should  be  daily  flood- 
ing his  ears  and  washing  out  of  the  brain  his  purely  sub- 
jective ideas.    The  result  is  obvious,  and  here  you  have 


OUR  AFRICAN  APPRENTICESHIP  61 

a  man  wlio  will  never  really  be  in  Africa  because  Africa 
never  really  gets  into  him. 

But  mere  negation  is  not  the  worst  part  of  the  story. 
For  positively  here  is  a  white  man  who  must  be  somebody 
in  Africa,  so,  dissembling  this  much-lacking  in-streaming 
flood  of  pure  negro  ideas,  he  pumps  up  his  poor  English 
counterfeits  from  the  deeps  of  his  British  breast.  Thus, 
too  drearily  often,  English  idiom  is  domesticated  on  African 
soil,  and  the  user  of  it,  though  he  lives  for  fifty  years  in 
the  land,  will  never  really  to  his  last  day  be  in  Africa. 
"  Bantu  of  the  boots,"  is  their  phrase  for  this  wooden 
Anglo-African  speech. 


CHAPTER  V 
'  Boring  in  "  Farther 


"Jog  on,  jog  on,  on  the  footpath  way, 
And  merrily  hent  the  stile-a; 
A  merry  heart  goes  all  the  way, 
Your  sad  tires  in  a  mile-a." 

•  »  « 

"Still  with  Sound  of  Trumpet 
Far,  far  off  the  daybreak  call : 
Hark  !  how  loud  and  clear  I  hear  it  wind 
Swift  to  the  Head  of  the  Army, 
Swift,  spring  to  your  places : 
Pioneers,  O  Pioneers!" 

«  •  » 

"Sometimes  a  light  surprises 
The  Christian  while  he  sings; 
It  is  the  Lord  Who  rises 
With  healing  in  His  wings." 


64 


CHAPTER  V 


"  Boring  in  "  Farther 

HEREIN  the  traveller  reads 
his  first  lesson  in  "  thinking 
black"  and  discovers  that  to  be  in  Africa 
the  said  Africa  must  be  in  him. 

BIG  with  fate  as  these  early  days  in  Bihe  are,  the  great 
event  of  our  real  start  is  now  looming  in  the  near 
future,  and  our  prospective  caravan  gives  us  a  lot  of 
work.  For  here  in  Bihe  we  find  out  that  the  launching  of 
a  Far-Interior  caravan  is  as  ceremonial  a  function  as  the 
sister  ceremony  in  connection  with  a  British  battleship.  It 
seems  that  just  as  God  gives  us  the  stars  and  we  all  make 
our  own  astronomy,  so  Mr.  Genus  Homo  Africanus  seizes  on 
a  hundred  humdrum  events  and  drives  the  monotony  out  of 
them  by  some  formal,  fashionable  function.  This  setting 
out  of  a  Far-Interior  caravan,  for  instance,  is  one  such 
event,  and  so  orthodox  in  character  that  you  must  begin 
by  ceremonially  "  going  into  camp,"  as  the  phrase  goes. 
Now,  this  only  means  that  you  formally  sliake  tlie  dust  from 
your  feet,  by  leaving  your  village  hut,  and,  picking  out  a 
bit  of  forest,  you  hoist  your  private  flag  on  the  highest 

66 


66 


THINKING  BLACK 


tree  :  the  solemn  "Blue  Peter"  this,  notifying  all  comers 
that  your  land  ship  has  already  set  out  on  its  long  voyage. 
Yet,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  real  start  is  many  a  month 
ahead,  but  deeds  are  the  only  eloquent  words  in  Africa — 
and  have  you  not,  after  all,  gone  a  few  formal  yards  from 
village  to  forest  ?  So,  there  in  the  woods,  you  build  a  hut, 
and  out  to  that  camp  your  prospective  carriers  troop, 
spending  the  dragging  days  quizzing  you  as  to  proposed 
route  and  destination.  One-sided  enough  this  heckling, 
for  you  must  be  precise  and  pertinent  in  your  answers, 
whereas  the  negro  only  responds  to  your  questions  in  a 
vague,  non-committal  voice.  This  policy  of  make-believe, 
however,  has  an  excellent  effect  on  the  raw  negro,  who  is 
all  eyes  and  no  ears,  and  the  result  is  that  right  off,  the 
news  goes  buzzing  round  the  district  that  the  "  big  devil " 
(Ochindele)  really  means  business  at  last.  Then  comes 
the  first  crowd  of  volunteers.  Be  sure  you  write  in  pencil, 
though,  not  ink,  for  generally  a  few  negro  wags  lead  off 
by  making  counterfeit  overtures  to  join  your  caravan,  the 
false  names  being  eagerly  recorded  by  the  impatient  white 
man.  Merely  the  "lead  pencil"  men  these,  who  turn  out 
to  be  as  visionary  as  the  Secretary  of  War's  "  spectl'al 
force,"  and  this  crowd  soon  thins  to  a  trickle  of  "  faithfuls," 
One  by  one  your  real  Olongamha  (carriers)  reluctantly 
permit  you  to  write  them  down,  Ham,  "  the  servant  of 
servants,"  being  for  once  wholly  the  master  of  this  situation, 
and  you  of  Japhetli  his  grovelling  suppliant.  His  whole 
talk  in  these  preliminary  days  of  negotiation  is  flavoured 
with  a  good  spice  of  negro  condescension,  for  did  not  this 


"BORING  IN"  FARTHER 


67 


very  black  man  pick  us  all  up  on  the  Benguella  seashore 
and  carry  us,  like  mere  baggage,  on  and  into  his  own 
interior  ?  No  wonder,  therefore,  the  whole  district  from 
which  you  recruit  your  carriers  is  converted  into  a  huge 
"  penny  in  the  slot "  machine,  for  you  must  put  in  your 
money  before  anything  can  be  got  out  of  it.  Moreover, 
this  note  of  independence  struck  so  early  and  so  frankly 
in  Bihe  is  continued  through  the  long  journey  until  at 
Kavungu  there  is  a  real  revolt,  mine  and  countermine, 
repulse  and  attack  for  days.  Thus  you  see  what  a 
masterful  mind  this  Bihean  of  ours  has,  the  real 
"pioneers"  being  these  old  blacks,  who  are  not  bashful 
in  reminding  us  of  the  fact. 

These,  moreover,  are  the  needy  days  when  to  your 
profit  and  loss  you  solemnly  invest  in  a  "Man  Friday." 
Cook,  Treasurer,  and  What-not  of  the  caravan,  "boy"  he 
is  called,  even  to  his  fortieth  year.  Nor  is  this  compact 
between  you,  his  master,  and  him,  your  factotum,  so 
quickly  sealed  and  settled.  Fixing  you  with  his  fathomless 
black  eyes,  with  appalling  candour  of  comment  he  leads  off 
by  inquiring  stonily  if  you  mean  to  cheat  him  as  the  last 
Portuguese  did,  and  generally  "  heckles  "  you  as  though  you 
were  a  prospective  local  M.P.  His  fatal  facility  for  jabber 
is  such  that  he  almost  argues  you  into  the  belief  that  you 
will  cheat  him,  his  theory  of  this  solemn  compact  being 
that  it  is  all  a  mere  speculation,  on  the  principle  of  "  heads 
you  get  paid,  tails  you  work  for  nothing."  However,  after 
half  a  dozen  inapposite  questions  ("  temper-testing,"  it  is 
called),  you  close  with  him,  and  Man  Friday,  very  conse- 


68 


THINKING  BLACK 


quential,  annexes  your  pots  and  pans  with  much  slamming 
and  banging.  A  child  of  earthenware  utensils,  what  sweet 
music  there  is  to  him  in  the  bang  of  an  iron  pot.  This  in 
fact  is  the  very  thing  that  makes  him  careless,  for  with  his 
own  fragile  native  thing  he  must  be  high-strung  and  care- 
ful even  to  trembling.  But  a  donkey  must  be  coaxed 
with  carrots,  and  this  culinary  compact  is  generally  signed, 
sealed,  and  delivered  by  a  sort  of  "  taking  the  shilling  "  on 
his  part — calico,  not  cash,  being  the  currency.  It  must  be 
white  and  not  dark  in  colour  this  fabric,  otherwise  you 
will  have  symbolised  sorrow  and  not  joy.  So  you  go  with 
the  tempting  tide,  and  having  conciliated  your  friend  the 
cook  ("  your  mother  "  is  his  phrase),  off  he  swaggers  to  the 
native  quarters,  all  glorious  in  a  loin-cloth  as  white  as 
the  untrodden  snow.  You  can  see  that  his  very  way  of 
donning  this  white  prophecy  of  happiness  is,  on  his  part,  a 
sort  of  flourish  in  the  face  of  fortune  by  which  he,  the  said 
Wanga,  defies  the  future  and  the  fates.  Indeed,  as  if  it 
were  all  a  page  of  Homer,  has  he  not  consulted  the 
"  Omens  "  for  a  favourable  start  ? 

Does  this  story  drag  ?  Blame  our  negro  and  let  us 
move  forward — Eastward  Ho !  Watch  now  the  rule  of 
the  Far-Interior  road.  Yonder  a  thousand  miles  from  the 
Ocean  is  your  objective,  and  the  farther  in  you  "bore" — 
that  word  again — your  pilgrim  kit  necessarily  assumes  an 
austerely  simple  aspect.  Like  ballooning  in  cloudland,  the 
higher  you  want  to  ascend  the  more  ballast  you  must 
throw  out,  and  even  so  with  this  Far-Interior  caravan 
of  ours.    At  the  Mildmay  prayer  meeting  did  not  that 


"BORING  IN  "  FARTHER  69 


pious  lady  whose  house  had  been  burgled  the  night  before 
return  thanks  to  the  Lord  that  "  He  had  made  her  lighter 
for  the  upward  flight"?  And  we  too  had  been  robbed, 
not  by  person  but  by  place,  for  our  last  and  nearest  bank 
lay  far  behind  on  the  Benguella  shore.  Praise  Him, 
s.  d.  is  demonetized  in  those  early  days,  and  the  only 
cheque-book  you  can  reckon  upon  is  God's  own  blank 
cheques,  your  Bible.  Did  not  Billy  Bray  love  to  say, 
"  The  promises  of  God  are  just  as  good  as  ready  money  any 
day  "  ?  So  the  fact  gradually  soaked  into  our  souls  that 
we  could  only  run  the  race  set  before  us  as  we  laid  aside 
every  weight.  Such  surely  was  the  pinch  of  this  particular 
party.  Narrow  indeed  is  the  way  that  leadeth  into  the 
Far  Interior.  In  this  exceptionally  hard  year  the  Garen- 
ganze  trail  is  indeed  a  narrow  cork-screw  thing,  and  our 
far-off  goal  can  only  be  gained  by  a  minimum  of  "dead 
loads."  Two  pairs  of  boots,  two  shirts,  and  (oh  luxury !) 
just  two  or  three  humble  handfuls  of  tea  for  the  long 
journey  and  longer  imprisonment  ahead.  The  pity  of  it, 
such  a  pauper  provision  of  tea  for  the  days  of  acclimatisa- 
tion lying  in  wait  for  us.  At  first,  this  terrible  tea  was 
reserved  only  for  the  high  solemnities  of  our  vagabond  life. 
As  the  days  of  depletion  advanced  on  us,  however,  and  the 
tea  nearly  finished,  it  was  only  by  the  feeling  of  a  sudden 
plunge  into  profligacy  wc  dared  to  drink  a  coward  cup  of 
straw-coloured  tea.  Crouching  like  a  devotee  at  a  shrine, 
before  a  smoky  fire,  your  Missionary,  in  the  most  appro- 
priate of  kneeling  attitudes  for  such  a  function,  brewed 
his  "cup  that  cheers"  with  all  the  solemnity  of  a  high 


70 


THINKING  BLACK 


priest  offering  an  oblation.  Even  long  after  that  last  tea- 
masking  had  given  out,  we  were  still,  with  a  tragic 
intensity,  boiling  and  reboiling  the  useless  leaves,  for  the 
sixth  time  certainly.  Nor  did  we  fail  to  get  at  least  white 
steaming  cups  of  best  "  Memory  Blend,"  for  the  tea  was  so 
weak  that  it  had  to  be  imagined.  Long  afterwards  we 
roasted  a  native  pea  into  supposititious  coffee,  but  to 
the  end  this  poor  substitute  was  a  doctor's  dose,  not 
a  "cup  that  cheers"  but  a  sort  of  pharmaceutical 
preparation. 

But  our  real  problem  is  not  Africa  but  the  African. 
Wouldst  thou  have  a  key  to  "  thinking  black  "  ?  Then 
look  at  him. 

Paul  was  accused  of  turning  the  world  upside  down, 
but  if  you  mix  enough  with  these  natives  and  use  your 
eyes  a  bit,  an  hour  of  it  will  suffice  to  give  you  the  notion 
that  you  are  standing  on  your  head,  life  is  all  so  upside 
down.  Yonder  is  a  ferryman  in  his  boat,  but  see  the 
black  turning  tables  on  the  white  by  placing  his  back  to 
the  stern,  face  to  the  bow,  and  off  he  starts  paddling  as 
though  he  were  stirring  his  porridge,  not  his  canoe. 
Laugh  you  first,  but  he  laughs  last ;  for  to  him,  what 
sense  is  there  in  a  white  man  looking  one  way  and  rowing 
another  ?  Wise  ?  Nay,  he  shakes  his  head  and  opines  we 
Europeans  are  wise,  but  our  wisdom  is  rather  showy  than 
exact.  The  black  man,  he  thinks,  is  wiser  than  he  seems, 
and  the  white  one  seems  wiser  than  he  is.  No  wonder 
this  looking-one-way-and-rowing-another  attitude  of  the 
white  man  becomes  the  negro's  parable  for  an  incon- 


"BORING  IN  "  FARTHER 


71 


sistent  Missionary.  Why  does  he  not  go  in  the  direction 
he  looks  ?    Why  preach  this  and  practise  that  ? 

It  is  now  raining,  be  it  noted,  and  the  problem  stands 
how  to  save  his  bare  black  body  from  the  cold  ;  very 
adroitly  he  draws  into  shore  and  dips  deep  in  the  water 
to  get  out  of  the  wet.  For  the  fisher  law  is  that  being 
wet  you  must  get  wetter  in  order  to  get  dry.  Watch 
now  the  same  man  land  in  the  reeds,  donning  his  clothing. 
Out  there  in  the  piercing  cold  he  was  as  bare  as  the  blast 
that  stung  him,  but  now  ashore  when  the  sun  scorches  he 
can  be  seen  sporting  not  one  but  two  sets  of  garments,  the 
whole  surmounted  with  a  mighty  blanket  of  many  hues. 
Now  watch  the  same  man  beginning  to  cultivate.  There 
he  is  gripping  his  spade,  and  digging  away  in  the 
opposite  manner  to  ours — that  is  to  say,  he  digs  towards 
and  not  away  from  himself.  Of  course,  after  sending  the 
earth  flying  at  this  rate,  he  is  now  dirty,  but  that  means 
he  is  white ;  for  a  negro  is  black  when  he  is  clean  and 
white  when  he  is  dirty. 

Give  him,  if  you  dare,  a  book  to  read,  and  he  will 
surely  hold  it  upside  down.  Watch  him  with  a  pencil 
affecting  a  fair  and  clerkly  handwriting,  and  he  is  sure  to 
begin  the  prank  from  right  to  left.  Ask  him  now  for  a 
drink  of  water,  and  being  the  very  pink  of  courtesy  he 
must  take  first  drink,  the  gourd-cup  receiving  a  loud 
labrose  smack  as  first  gulp.  Reeking  of  resultant  aroma 
Africanum,  you  may  now  have  your  sip,  for  has  he  not 
guaranteed  the  said  water  pure  from  poison,  as  saith  their 
proverb,  "  Drink  finst,  die  first "  ?    Even  the  almanac 


72 


THINKING  BLACK 


turns  somersault,  for  here  is  an  African  winter  as  hot 
as  an  Indian  summer  sweeping  over  the  country  like  a 
fire  :  a  conundrum  in  human  speech,  "  a  fiery  freezing 
winter."  Watch  now  the  same  negro  produce  a  pair  of 
ancient  boots,  and  carefully  as  fastidiously  lace  them  up 
^ith  bark  rope — surely  this  time  he  is  going  to  be  normal 
at  last.  Not  he,  for  quite  solemnly  he  produces  an  old 
pair  of  socks  and  wears  them  outside  his  boots.  The 
same  man  again  sports  a  starched  shirt  once  white,  but 
now  unredeemedly  vile,  a  vision  of  smudges.  Down 
dips  the  sun  and  out  come  the  stars,  but  the  tale  of 
topsy-turvyism  is  not  yet  finished.  There  is  your  old 
Northern  friend  the  "  Great  Bear  "  on  the  horizon,  but 
this  time  he  is  upside  down.  Sprawling  on  his  back  in  a 
manner  most  undignified  for  a  respectable  constellation, 
he  is  one  more  instance  of  the  somersault  ways  of  this 
queer  land. 

(Later.) 

But  stay.  These  upside-down  doings  are  not  yet 
complete. 

The  scene  again  changes,  but  not  the  subject.  Enters 
a  young  slip  of  a  girl  who  has  been  beaten  for  no  fault  of 
hers,  yet  never  a  tear  does  she  shed  :  no  tears  mark  you, 
and  no  crime  did  she  commit.  On  plying  them  with  ques- 
tions, I  find  that  far  from  her  innocence  being  conjectural 
they  blandly  admit  she  did  nothing  worthy  of  stripes. 
Yet  she  got  them  all,  forty  phis  more,  and  the  curiously 
candid  confession  is  that  because  she  was  innocent  there- 
fore was  she  beaten  with  many  stripes.    It  now  comes 


"BORING  IN"  FARTHER 


73 


out  that  the  African  can  wriggle  out  of  even  this  injustice, 
the  explanation  being  that  the  girl  is  a  twin,  and  as  her 
sister  did  the  deed  they  must  be  beaten  in  pairs ;  not 
either  nor  neither,  but  both  or  none.  Twins  they  were 
born  and  twins  they  live  and  die.  So  mad  are  the  Africans 
on  this  twin  subject  that  even  when  Miss  First  gets 
married,  the  bridegroom  is  forced  to  marry  her  twin-sister 
Miss  Second  on  the  same  day.  (Although  these  sisters 
are  slim  little  things,  yet  literally  their  names  are  Miss 
Elephant  and  Miss  Hippo,  all  twins  being  forced  to  take 
these  two  traditional  titles. )  There  was  a  case  here  where 
twin-brothers  were  forced  to  marry  the  same  lady,  so  in- 
exorably operates  this  dogging  law.  Right  up  from  birth 
each  has  ever  haunted  the  other,  their  food  being  scrupu- 
lously divided  into  two,  the  twin  bairns  with  twin  portions. 
In  proffering  them  a  gift  you  must  sternly  make  it  a  two- 
handed  one,  simultaneously  holding  out  both  arms  to  both 
recipients.  When  a  twin  sickens  mortally  no  doctor  may 
be  called  nor  any  medicine  administered,  all  mourning 
being  deprecated.  God,  they  say,  did  this  deed  of  creating 
"  terrible  twins,"  and  God  must  kill  or  cure  them.  The 
only  way  to  wish  them  well  is  by  cursing  them,  and  these 
cursings  the  complacent  twins  receive  as  choice  compli- 
ments. The  hapless  father  and  mother  likewise  get  all 
the  town  abuse,  each  vituperation  being  a  sort  of  upside- 
down  blessing.  Yet  these  are  the  very  folks  who  would 
throw  the  old  anti-Paul  taunt  at  us  about  turning  the 
world  upside-down.  Dare  to  suggest  to  them  this,  and 
Mr,  African  at  once  engages  in  a  very  unfavourable 


74 


THINKING  BLACK 


diagnosis  of  the  mental  state  of  a  "  white  "  who  can 
hazard  such  nonsense. 

{I9th  June  1890.) 
Here  comes  June,  and  the  time  to  be  up  and  off. 
Across  a  brook,  on  the  third,  we  ^  wave  good-bye  to  kind 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Arnot,  and  away  East  we  go,  off  and  out 
of  Bihe.  Just  in  time,  too,  for  war  is  brewing,  the 
Bihean  bent  on  giving  his  last  national  kick  at  the 
Portuguese.  More  than  that :  this  brewing  storm  breaks 
behind  our  backs,  and  we  are  swept  before  it,  not  out 
to  the  Ocean — that  has  storms  enough — but  into  our 
long-loved,  long-lived-in  Interior.  My  old  friend  Senhor 
Silva  Porto,  Capitao  Mor,  seeing  trouble  ahead,  resolved 
on  sudden  suicide,  and  blew  himself  up  with  gunpowder. 
A  dramatic  death  this.  Six  barrels  of  gunpowder  lined 
out  as  deathbed,  the  said  six  covered  with  a  drapery  of 
Portuguese  flags,  the  old  Portuguese  topping  it  all  as  sad- 
hearted  sacrifice.  Up  went  the  famous  explorer  in  an 
explosion,  and  down  went  the  old  Bihe  dynasty  in  that 
same  smash.  For  this  death  of  Silva  Porto  must  be 
avenged.  Too  long  ignored  by  his  own  nation,  too  long 
despised  by  the  Biheans,  here  is  his  solution  to  force  the 

^  Peccavil  I  fiiul  I  have  been  remiss  in  my  intioduclions — who  are  the 
"  We"  ?  In  the  sequence  of  seniority  the  names  arc  Messrs.  Thompson,  Lane, 
and  "the  writer,"  a  mere  boy  in  those  days.  A  tlireefold  cord  not  easily 
broken,  we  were  utter  strangers  to  each  other  at  the  start  and  represented 
the  three  nationalities  of  our  race.  Yet  I  can  recall  with  delight  the  splendid 
lives  these  good  men  lived  before  my  eyes,  the  consummate  fellowship  being  a 
treasure.  Mere  rules  and  regulations  in  Africa  are  a  poor  enough  guarantee 
for  a  tranquil  time,  but  if  love  be  the  fulfilling  of  the  whole  law,  then  love 
guided  by  the  Word  of  God  is  better  than  any  code  of  laws. 


THE    ETEliNAL  PROBLEM 
"  How  to  Cross." 


"BORING  IN"  FARTHER  75 


Government's    hands.    And,    sure   enough,    Bihe  was 

broken  :  Captain  Paiva's  joint  expedition  of  Portuguese 

and  Boers  came  on  the  scene,  the  king  captured  and  carried 

off  to  San  Tome.    There  the  wild  Atlantic  is  Portugal's 

surest  sentinel  on  that  lonely  isle ;  there  the  slaves  find 

themselves  so  hopelessly  locked  in  for  life  that  they  eat 

earth  for  suicide. 

This  is  how  we  take  the  great  plunge.    An  Ombala, 

or  Chiefs  town,  rests  upon  the  top  of  the  rather  steep 

slope  slanting  down  to  the  sandy  Kwanza  beach,  crowded 

with  "  dugouts."    But  this  ramshackle  village  is  so  very 

much  the  key  to  the  crossing  that  you  must  enter  by  its 

front  gate,  wriggle  through  the  huts  of  the  malodorous 

town  to  effect  your  exit  on  the  shore.    We  don't  stand 

long,  however,  ere  there  files  down  to  the  beach  a  long 

trading  caravan,  waving  the  big  flag  of  little  Portugal^ 

and  this  with  ours  makes  a  fine  babel  in  bidding  for 

canoes.    Meantime,  Messrs.  Thompson  and  Lane  have 

crossed  to  receive  our  loads,  while  I  remain  for  three 

mortal  hours  to  direct  the  crossing.    Then  (Heaven-sent 

chance  !)  the  old  broken-backed  chief  comes  down,  and  we 

sit  cheek  by  jowl  chatting  Christianity.    With  one  foot 

in  the  grave,  here  is  a  withered  old  man  treating  you  to 

a  long,  disconcerting  scrutiny,  and  quizzing  incredulously 

as  to  our  Garenganze  Gospel  venture.    We  yet  await 

classification,  it  seems ;  we  are  not  traders,  nor  raiders, 

therefore  he   cannot  get  at  us,  cannot   "  place "  us. 

The  only  category  he  can  conceive  is  that  of  the  "  people 

who  live  by  doing  nothing."    The  Vachokwe  tribe,  next- 
6 


76 


THINKING  BLACK 


door  neighbours  but  one,  kindly  allowing  for  a  probable 
touch  of  African  sun,  called' us  the  Afuhi,  or  "Softies," 
this  because  we  refuse  to  point  a  business-looking 
revolver  at  their  nose.  Farther  East  still  we  were 
dubbed  "The  God-ites  "  because  we  preach  the  Gospel, 
and  sometimes  "The  Feminines"  because  we  refuse  to 
spill  blood.  With  his  bunch  of  charms  round  the  neck, 
you  can  see  it  is  all — Church  of  God,  for  shame ! — so 
bewilderingly  new,  newness  being  naturally  the  bar  sinister 
of  African  thought.  Antiquity  in  Africa  means  sanctity, 
remember :  a  tremendous  affair  this  antiquity,  a  religion 
almost.  "  An  old  well-worn  path  must  lead  up  to  a  big 
chief"  is  their  way  of  saying  that  their  millions  of  a 
majority  ("the  well-worn  path"  of  precedent)  has  out- 
voted you  and  your  Christianity.  You,  a  mere  Mission- 
ary in  the  microscopic  minority  of  one,  where  is  your 
well-beaten  track  of  precedent  inspiring  the  traveller's 
confidence  ?  With  your  white  skin  and  creaking  boots, 
he  looks  at  you  as  though,  perchance,  you  were  the 
denizen  of  another  planet.  Oh  !  drop  with  me  a  tear  for 
the  poor  old  men  and  women  of  Africa  who  hug  their 
fetishes,  and  whose  hearts  are  the  dwellings  of  night. 
They  have  a  weird  way  of  waving  you  ofi",  as  much  as  to 
say,  "  Too  late !  It  is  not  for  me."  Can  their  idea  be, 
that  as  the  grave  is  so  soon  to  receive  their  dust,  why 
should  they  offer  Christ  the  wreck  of  their  souls  ?  The 
sad  old  tell-tale  faces  seem  each  to  say,  with  a  wail : — 

"Look  in  my  face:  my  name  is  '  I\Ii<^lit  liave  been'; 
I  am  also  called  '  No  more,'  '  Too  late,'  '  Farewell.' " 


"BORING  IN"  FARTHER 


77 


It  is  in  talking  with  all  such  that  the  Missionary  hears 
the  bugle  call  of  the  long-coming  struggle  ahead — I  mean 
the  lack  of  conviction  of  sin.  Unlike  a  man  in  England, 
cradled  in  Gospel  privilege,  here  we  meet  thousands  of 
souls  who  cannot  feel  remorse,  for  they  are  only  the 
children  of  their  dark  ancestors  who  lived  and  died  in 
darkness.  Ask  such  an  one  if  he  is  at  peace  with  God, 
and  he,  a  negro  who  was  never  sick  or  sorry  in  his  life, 
will  answer  with  alacrity  that  he  never  quarrelled  with 
Him.  No  wonder  that  peace  had  to  be  "  made  "  for  such, 
apart  from  their  opinion  on  the  matter.  They  themselves 
say  of  true  conviction  of  sin,  "A  shivering  man  does  not 
need  to  be  forced  to  the  fire,"  and  this  is  the  reason  there 
has  been  no  authentic  weeping  for  sin  in  any  African 
Mission  until  a  preliminary  period  of  evangelical  witness 
has  been  passed.  Then  the  tears  begin  to  glisten  over 
personal  (not  tribal,  this  time)  responsibility. 

(Later.)  ^ 

Across  the  gulf  of  twenty  years,  ours  is  the  pure 
untarnished  joy  to  see  many  such  old  folk  rejoicing  in  the 
evening  of  life.  Their  morning  broke  grey  and  their  mid- 
day was  dark  and  stormy,  but  the  glory  of  this  evening 
sunset  blots  out  the  memory  of  their  gloom.  When  one 
beholds  the  sacred  sight  of  a  group  of  grey  woolly  heads  in 
a  meeting,  listening  with  a  glaze  over  their  eyes  and  a  fog 
over  their  souls,  one  feels  stirred  anew  to  press  on.  They 

J  Occurring,  as  it  docs,  quite  often,  this  "  Later  "  indicates  that  the  section 
of  the  narrative  it  introduces  is  subseriucnt  in  time  but  similar  in  characli  r 
to  the  conditions  of  the  context. 


78 


THINKING  BLACK 


believe,  some  of  these  old  dears,  believe  with  aged  bodies 
and  childhood  hearts.  Summer  has  come  late  to  them, 
no  doubt,  but  it  is  the  summer  of  God  that  knows  no 
winter.  There  they  are,  crooning  an  old  "  Golgotha " 
song  of  Christ's  dying  pangs.  Pitched  on  the  wrong  key, 
notes  all  out,  yet  I  defy  you  to  deny  that  they  are 
singing  sense  into  that  holy  hymn. 

{20th  August.) 
It  is  notorious  that  our  African  is  a  congenital  liar, 
and  here  comes  an  example.  Breaking  your  way  along 
the  trail,  any  native  travellers  you  encounter  make 
strange  temporising  manoeuvres  until  convinced  you 
come  peaceably.  A  party  of  six  carrying  food  signals 
us  a  long  distance  oflf,  and  their  plan  is  literally  to 
"hedge"  us.  Immediately  all  the  baskets  are  in  hiding 
in  the  grass,  along  with  five  of  the  party  who  lie  flat 
with  bated  breath,  while  No.  6,  a  bolder  spirit  he,  comes 
slowly  along  the  path  till  we  accost  him.  His  story  is 
always  a  stupid  concoction  of  lies,  not  at  all  cleverly 
spun,  but  palpably  false;  not  mere  "embroidery,"  that 
is  to  say,  but  the  lie  circumstantial.  When,  however,  you 
divulge  your  identity  as  peaceful  nobodies,  away  to  the 
winds  go  his  fears,  and  he  coolly  whistles  up  his  friends 
in  hiding,  utterly  regardless  of  the  lie-direct  this  ugly 
appearance  of  theirs  gives  to  his  sheepish  story.  Nor  is 
our  rascal  ashamed  one  tiny  bit.  For  with  eyes  liquid 
with  mirth  he — ^just  a  plain  everyday  liar — enjoys  it  all, 
and  sees  no  sting  in  the  suggestion  that  he  is  one  of  the 
greatest   tale-tellers  within  the  confines   of  the  solar 


''BORING  IN"  FARTHER 


79 


system.  Suggest  that  he  is  a  silly  liar  and  he  will  soon 
prove  that  he  is  a  master  of  the  art  by  arguing  that  there 
was  no  "cuteness  "  in  thus  frankly  owning  up  :  is  not  the 
man  who  sticks  to  one  lie  forced  to  invent  twenty  more  to 
maintain  that  one  ?  So  there  is  a  method  in  this  madness 
after  all.  (Remember  the  sub-title  of  this  book  should  be  : 
"The  Blacks  as  bad  as  the  Whites.")  When,  however, 
the  English  negrophobes  proceed  to  prove  from  this  that 
such  a  long  liar  cannot  be  a  man  but  a  monkey,  then  it  is 
— ^just  then  ! — this  very  negro  proves  from  his  very  mode 
of  mendacity  that  he  is  a  Britisher's  own  brother.  For, 
baffling  personality  though  he  be,  this  black  man  backs 
his  lie  with  blasphemy,  a  la  Whitechaj)el,  dragging  down 
the  name  of  God  into  the  mud  of  mendacity,  "  As  sure  as 

G  !  "  the  famous  formula  of  his  sin.    Why  is  it  that 

lost  blacks  like  "found  "  whites  all  sharpen  the  point  of  a 
lie  with  the  name  of  God  and  thus  drive  it  home  ?  Yet 
they  inconsistently  laugh  at  our  preaching  about  God. 
There  is  no  God  to  worship,  no  God  to  serve,  no  God  to 
pray  to — only  a  God  to  swear  by. 

To  prove  that  this  is  no  mere  subjective  notion  on  a 
Missionary's  part,  this  black  link  with  England  becomes 
realistic  when  you  see  that  same  negro  draw  his  finger 
across  his  throat,  the  accompanying  formula  being  that 
old  refuge  of  lies :  "As  sure  as  death ! "  Verily  the 
whole  world  is  kin,  for  here  is  a  black  man  sighting  a 
white  skin  for  the  first  time  in  his  life.  Watch,  too,  that 
parting  quip  he  throws  at  you  just  as  ho  disappears  into 
the  grass.    Like  a  naughty  British  schoolboy  off  he  goes, 


80 


THINKING  BLACK 


pulling  down  his  brown  eyelid  with  mock-anxious  solici- 
tude as  to  there  being  any  green  therein. 

TV"  Tt- 

We  now  swing  from  melodrama  to  grim  tragedy,  and 
here  is  a  stern  old  priest  who  has  ju.st  killed  his  young 
brother,  yet  not  the  least  concerned.    A  famous  decocter 
of  poisons,  his  brother  was  chased  into  his  own  village  by 
some  neighbours  who  accused  him  of  theft.    The  grim 
old  priest  listened  to  his  brother's  protestations  of  inno- 
cence, then,  spreading  out  his  hands  pontifically,  said  in 
really  a  relieved  voice,  "  Oh !  then,  if  thou  art  innocent, 
thou  wilt  drink  this  poison  ordeal  to  justify  thyself." 
So,  suiting  the  way  to  the  words,  this  son  of  the  witch 
of  Endor,  with  the  blind  and  magnificeut  enthusiasm  of 
their  cult,  asked  his  beloved  younger  brother  to  enter  the 
house,  passed  in  the  lethal  cup,  a  few  minutes  sufficing  to 
kill  his  man.    Meanwhile,  love  or  no  love,  here  is  the  old 
priest  spurning  that  very  corpse  of  the  victim-brother,  his 
belief  being  that  inherent  righteousness  is  so  mighty  that 
it  can  neutralise  even  the  deadliest  drug.    His  brother 
beloved,  therefore,  died  with  a  lie  in  his  breast — "  We 
can  do  nothing  against  the  truth,"  is  the  saying  of  these, 
the  world's  greatest  liars.    In  plain  English,  here  you 
have  the  impudent  paradox  that  where  lying  abounds 
there,  even  there,  truth — in  theory — much  more  abounds. 

So  here  comes  the  conundrum  :  How  can  a  nation  of 
liars  consistently  believe  we  can  do  nothing  against  the 
truth,  locked  up  in  a  falsely  accused  man's  breast  ?  If  he 
is  innocent  he  will  not  die.    Plied  the  old  priest  with 


"BORING  IN"  FARTHER  81 


questions,  but  at  the  end  we  were  no  nearer  than  the 
poles,  for  he  stuck  to  it  that  neither  fire,  nor  water,  nor 
poison  could  kill  by  ordeal  a  really  just  man.  So,  instead 
of  burial,  the  body  was  condemned  to  what  is  called 
"witch  cremation,"  the  smoke  and  flame  ascending  "to 
feed  the  stars."  With  the  slight  stammer  that  gives  a 
charming  emphasis  to  his  remarks,  here  is  an  old  liar 
preaching  to  me  a  homily  on  the  Truth,  a  subject  he 
knows  very  little  about,  for  sure  am  I  his  telegraphic 
address  is  not  "Veracity,  Africa."  The  Arab's  version 
of  this  negro  inconsistency  runs  thus  :  "A  crow  exclaimed, 
God  is  the  Truth."  "Then,"  quoth  the  listeners,  "the 
dirt-scraper  has  turned  preacher." 

(Later.) 

See  how  the  Devil  outwits  the  Devil.  Two  hours 
antecedent  to  my  pitching  camp,  there  had  been  a  foul 
murder.  Constructive,  premeditated  butchery,  the  very 
devilishness  of  this  deed  created  quite  an  atmosphere 
for  my  message.  The  long-smothered  tribal  conscience 
begins  to  assert  itself,  and  for  two  long  days  they  hang  on 
my  evangel,  the  whole  being  uttered  in  a  conciliating  I- 
do-not-talk-to-you-but-with-you  kind  of  tone.  They  now 
actually  wince  at  the  very  thought  of  death,  they,  the 
wantons,  who  otherwise  would  have  been  nonchalant. 
Every  mention  I  make  of  it  is  a  jag  to  the  murderers,  and 
if  they  are  not  prepared  to  think  of  death  they  are  not 
prepared  to  meet  him,  for  if  the  shadow  alarms  them  what 
of  the  reality  ?  Yes,  murder  will  out.  I  came  on  the 
trail  of  a  butchery  of  fliroe  travellers,  husband,  wife,  and 


82  THINKING  BLACK 

son.  A  tiny  thing  proved  the  clue,  and  soon  this  hidden 
horror  was  heard  crying  out  to  Heaven  as  loud  as  the 
blood  of  Abel.  The  whole  thing  would  have  been  hid — 
one  of  the  many  mysteries  of  the  marshes — had  not  a 
young  woman  died  at  Chisenga,  the  usual  Nanga  being  called 
in  to  consult  the  oracle  as  to  cause  of  death.  This  old 
*'  borderland  professional "  (their  local  title,  this)  was  not 
lackinor  in  the  true  bloodhound  instinct  of  scenting  a  trail. 
Rino-ins  up  the  underworld  for  information,  the  oracle 
himself  replied  that  the  girl  had  died  a  natural  death,  yet 
some  other  dead  people  were  crpng  from  the  ground  for 
vengeance.  And  now  the  "  devil-doctor  "  turns  fierce  on 
his  clients  and  upbraids  them  for  hiding  even' a  little  from 
him  :  "  Confess  and  I  absolve,"  cried  he.  "  Look  at  the 
poisonous  cassava  we  eat  as  tribal  diet :  by  soaking  it  in 
water  it  loses  its  deadly  efi"ect,  and  so,  too,  with  that  bitter 
secret  of  murder  in  your  breast,  pour  it  out  to  your  priest 
and  it  will  lose  its  sting  ! "  But  still  they  are  obdurate, 
so  the  old  doctor  snaps  his  fingers  at  them,  says  that  he 
is  a  man  of  many  means,  and  again  rings  up  the  oracle, 
with  the  result  that  it  all  comes  out.  For  during  her 
illness  that  dying  woman  had  received  kindly  care  from 
her  husband,  and  among  other  things  he  robed  her  in  a 
fancy  red  shawl.  "  Now,"  said  the  wily  ^anga  dramati- 
cally, "that  shawl  was  a  blood-shawl."  And  sure  enough 
in  two  ticks  he  pieced  together  the  genuine  data  of  a 
triple  murder  and  plunder  from  this  shawl  clue.  (If  one 
may  speak  of  the  light  of  conscience,  then  they  have  got  it 
— ^just  enough  to  light  them  to  Hell  !).    The  murderer 


"BORING  IN  '  FARTHER  83 

was  a  canoe-man  who  found  out  soon  enough  that  dead 
men  can  chase  the  living  both  above  ground  and  beneath. 
These  three  strangers  had  come  to  the  ferry  seeking  a 
crossing,  and  soon  they  were  shooting  across  the  creeks  to 
the  other  side.  But  as  the  time  passed,  the  ferryman 
slowly  and  surely  found  himself  in  the  deadly  grips  of 
this  murderous  idea  to  kill  his  passengers  and  grab  their 
goods,  particularly  that  red  shawl,  yes,  that  blood-red 
shawl.  So  he  did  the  deed,  speared  the  lot,  and  threw 
the  bodies  to  the  crocs.  But  watch  how  heaven,  earth, 
and  water  are  leagued  against  him  and  sworn  into  the 
service  of  justice  as  sort  of  special  constables  to  patrol 
the  lonely  marshes.  Incredible  it  all  looks,  yet  you  can 
shudderingly  guess  what  happened — the  crocodiles  refused 
to  oblige  the  murderer,  and  kept  well  up  river  near  their 
favourite  promenade,  the  confluence.  Next  come  the 
quick  currents  on  the  scene  as  sort  of  Scotland  Yard 
detectives,  and  away  they  go  at  full  speed,  the  three 
corpses  sailing  straight  for  the  murderer's  own  fishing-hut 
hard  on  the  shore.  At  dawn,  out  comes  Eugene  Aram 
African  us,  to  be  confronted  with  his  victims,  the  long 
accurate  voyage  perfectly  piloted  by  God  Almighty's  own 
currents.  Tableau  !  N.,  S.,  E.,  and  W.  that  murderer 
looked  before  doing  the  deed,  looked  everywhere — except 
UP.  And,  of  course,  this  is  only  half  of  the  story,  for  the 
expectant  hostess,  seeing  the  days  pass,  suspects  foul  play. 
There  are  currents  on  land  as  well  as  on  water,  and  people's 
tongues  will  wag.  And  just  as  tlie  river  currents  brought 
the  corpses  home  to  the  murderer,  so  these  land  currents 


84 


THINKING  BLACK 


of  gossip  brought  the  charge  home  to  him  too — was  ever 
man  so  hemmed  in  by  a  fence  of  his  own  contriving  ? 

#  # 

The  monkeys,  scared  off  our  route,  arc  rare  as 
small :  you  must  push  East  with  us  to  the  Lufira  Valley 
to  see  their  frolics.  There  it  was  I  found  a  whole  town 
in  the  terror  of  a  monkey  battle,  big  yellow  fellows  who 
stand  up  to  a  man  and  fight  him.  With  all  the  ready 
resources  and  fine  tact  of  his  tribe,  this  long- tailed  monkey 
apes  the  biped  in  many  things,  particularly  the  deft 
breaking  off"  a  stick  to  thrash  a  man.  Yonder  in  the 
dark  grove  of  trees  fringing  the  cornfields,  the  whole 
yellow  regiment  have  mobilised  for  three  days'  campaign 
— sort  of  anti-corn-laws  crusade,  call  it.  The  trouble  is, 
however,  that  in  moukeydom  they  arc  not  all  birds  of 
a  feather  who  so  flock  together,  and  when  they  are  not 
fighting  the  natives  they  are  having  a  wild  time  together, 
monkey  versus  monkey.  One  chap,  two  inches  taller  or 
two  ounces  heavier  than  his  fellow,  must  have  a  wipe  at 
his  junior — the  old  tale  this,  that  the  common  attraction 
drawing  them  together  makes  them  less  attractive  to  each 
other.  Beaten  off"  a  hundred  times  from  the  ripening 
corn,  there  they  are  with  a  chastened  optimism  still 
entrenched  in  the  grove  for  a  night  sortie,  and  the  moon 
high  in  the  west  will  see  a  victory  the  sun  denied  them. 
The  field-owners  are  so  philosophic  over  this  annual 
attack  that  tliey  call  it  the  monkeys  "tithing  the  corn." 
Followed  up  to  their  grove,  these  animals  know  so  well 
the  rules  of  the  game,  that  they  greet  the  negroes  with 


"BORING  IN  "  FARTHER 


85 


showers  of  stones,  some  of  which  strike  home.  But  there 
is  a  monkey  ambulance  idea,  the  most  human  touch  of 
all.  When  a  negro  wounds  his  monkey  with  an  arrow, 
in  a  jiffy  the  army-surgeon  of  the  quadrupeds  whips  up 
the  wounded  monkey,  spits  vigorously  over  the  spot,  tears 
off  a  morsel  of  bark  from  a  tree,  and  rubs  in  the  resultant 
medicine,  spitting  and  rubbing  again  and  again  for  a 
cure. 

But  the  biter  often  gets  bit  in  this  business,  and 
during  the  lean  days  of  famine  I  found  Master  Monkey 
himself  make  excellent  emergency  eating  :  have  enjoyed 
dozens  of  them  soaked  in  banana  vinegar.  Nevertheless, 
a  long  good-bye  to  monkey  stew.    Never  no  more.  The 
last  I  shot  got  his  bullet  in  the  breast ;  but  standing  bolt 
upright,  he  tragically  put  his  hand  on  the  red  oozing 
blood,  and  three  times  thrilled  me  by  pointing  indignantly 
at  his  wounds.    Like  a  K.C.  for  the  prosecution,  "  J" ac- 
cuse,^' those   three  mute  but  eloquent  appeals  to  his 
wounds  stabbed  me  with  remorse.    To  recall  the  re- 
proachful glances  from  the  large,  liquid,  mild  eyes  of  a 
(lying  antelope  is  bad  enough,  but  here  is  something  with 
vastly  more  sting  in  it.    Another  and  cuter  monkey 
avoided  death  and  the  subsequent  dinner  by — what  do 
you  think  ? — point-blank  theatrically  refusing  to  be  shot. 
Seeing  the  gun  levelled  at  him,  he  puckered  his  brows 
with  incredulity,  and  waving  his  arms  with  indignation 
defied  the  hunter  to  commit  such  an  unlieard-of  crime. 
"Me?  who  ever  killed  my  kind?"  he  seemed  to  say. 
Needless  to  add,  down  came  the  uushot  barrel,  and  off 


86 


THINKING  BLACK 


stalked  Mr.  Monkey,  an  easy  winner.  Why  not?  He 
alone  of  all  the  forest  fauna  has  learned  the  law  of  the 
lever :  he  alone  uses  a  stick  to  prise  open  a  box-lid. 

I  wonder,  in  a  way,  if  these  negroes  learn  their  gestures 
from  the  local  monkeys.  Amid  all  the  jabber  of  rival 
dialects  the  best  because  most  eloquent  sort  of  lingo  is 
this  language  of  negro  gesture,  arms  waving  in  the  wind 
like  semaphores.  Not  the  zigzag  movements  of  an 
excited  Frenchman  this,  nor  yet  the  impoverished  ex- 
pedients of  deaf-mutes  :  here,  I  say,  you  have  a  serious 
vocabulary  of  gesture,  with  deep  abstract  ideas  stinging 
you  with  sarcasm.  The  mechanics  of  African  speech 
this,  so  to  speak ;  the  pulley  and  lever  and  screw  of 
conversation.  0  that  magician  wave  of  the  negro  hand  ! 
With  it  they  demand,  they  promise,  they  call,  refuse, 
interrogate,  admire,  reckon,  confess,  repent,  express 
fear,  express  shame,  express  doubt,  instruct,  command, 
unite,  encourage,  swear,  testify,  accuse,  condemn,  acquit, 
insult,  despise,  defy,  disdain,  flatter,  applaud,  bless,  abuse, 
ridicule,  reconcile,  recommend,  exalt,  regale,  gladden,  com- 
plain, afflict,  discomfort,  discourage,  astonish,  exclaim, 
indicate  silence,  and  what-not ;  with  a  variety  and  multi- 
plication that  keep  pace  with  the  tongue.  And  yet  we, 
the  progeny  of  John  Bull,  dare  to  talk  for  hours  with 
hands  down  in  the  pits  of  our  pockets  !  Take,  for  instance, 
such  an  everyday  thing  as  the  pointed  finger  thus  : 
What  is  the  true  African  idea  of  such  a  gesture  ?  Well, 
here's  a  thing  so  deeply  abstract  that  it  could  drown  you 
in  its  depths  of  irony.    Certainly  you  will  be  very  chary  of 


A   TYPICAL   "MOP"  HEAD-DRESS. 


"BORING  IN  "  FARTHER  87 


pointing  your  finger  in  future.  For  in  this  action  what 
do  you  do  if  not  point  one  finger  only  at  the  black  man, 
and  three  at  yourself  ?  So  ho  !  you  are  trebly  as  bad  as 
the  man  you  point  at.  Else,  why  point  one  only  at  him 
and  bend  back  three  on  yourself  ?  Here,  then,  is  a  gesture 
you  must  solemnly  schedule  in  your  lexicon  as  The- 
Hypocrisy  -  so  -  vile  -  that  -  it-  accuses  -  another  -  of  -  an  -  evil  -  it  - 
itself-possesses-three-times-stronger.^  The  moral  of  all 
this  is  that  the  Missionary  who  goes  round  an  African 
village  pointing  his  accusing  finger  at  the  negro  is 
really  accusing  himself  in  a  three-to-one  degree.  Are 
they  ungrateful  ?  Then  we  the  finger-pointers  are  trebly 
so  Do  we  warn  them  to  forget  not  all  His  benefits  ? 

Then  our  very  gesture  is  a  threefold  warning  to  do 
likewise. 

(Later.) 

Cut  off"  from  your  nearest  shop  by  hundreds  of  miles, 
what  a  fuss  there  is  before  you  shoot  supper.  Emerging 
on  our  last  stream  for  the  day,  we  find  it,  not  flowing,  but 
only  dilly-dallying  through  a  green  meadow  dotted  all 
over  with  red  buck.  Corresponding  with,  but  by  no 
manner  of  means  resembling,  an  English  butcher's  shop, 
these  qui  vive  antelopes  out  on  the  plain  arc  the  only 
chance  we  have  of  filling  our  pots  for  suppor.  A  sort  of 
local  "  penny  in  the  slot "  meat-machine  this,  warranting 
rich,  red  cutlets.  Only  instead  of  the  unknown  penny,  you 
slip  a  cartridge  into  the  slot  of  your  rifle  and,  click  !  drops 
idead  your  antelope.    So  much,  and  no  more,  for  the  local 

1  I  1 1  1  1  I 


88 


THINKING  BLACK 


meat-shop  ;  now  for  your  Luban  bedroom.  Yonder  it  is 
hidden  discreetly  on  the  edge  of  a  thicket  in  the  same  old 
sixpence  of  a  hamlet  built  on  pestilential  soil,  and  there, 
in  the  dust,  we  must  sleep  the  sleep  of  the  just.  The 
deepening  darkness,  however,  forces  us  to  postpone  our 
supper-shot  till  the  morrow,  and  lying  down  genuinely 
"meat  hungry"  we  dream  of  a  morning  fry  of  juicy 
venison  "  fixings."  The  sun  rose,  and  so  did  we  ;  but  our 
brave  butcher's  shop  has  vanished  in  the  night,  dashing 
for  dear  life.  For  in  the  moonlight  ("  There  goes  our 
breakfast,"  thought  I),  wuff !  wuff !  came  a  pack  of  jackals 
scurrying  through  the  meadow,  chasing  those  antelopes 
for  their  lives  ;  miles  and  miles  they  pant,  heaving  flanks 
and  gaping,  dribbly  mouths  telling  how  terror-struck  are 
the  buck. 

Nothing  reminiscent  of  England  here ;  no  copse  and 
hedgerow,  no  down  and  moor,  no  slate  roof  and  grey 
spire ;  a  wilder,  denser  look  everywhere,  and  just  so 
much  more  interesting.  Farewell  the  gas,  glare,  and 
paint  of  thy  shops,  0  Albion  !  Shops,  did  I  say  ?  The 
African  never  dreamed  the  shop-idea,  and  only  very 
grudgingly  will  he  be  so  kind  as  to  barter  you  an  evening 
meal,  kind  for  kind.  But — shop  or  no  shop — fish  I  want 
and  fish  I  resolve  to  have,  for  their  tell-tale  bones  are 
strewn  all  over  the  town.  The  Chief  tried  to  brazen  the 
matter  out,  but  with  stony  severity  I  met  his  every  no, 
no,  no,  with  my  sanguine  yes,  yes,  yes.  "  All  right,"  said 
he  wearily,  "  if  fish  you  must  have,  fish  I  must  find,  so 
just  wait  till  I  poison  some  for  you."    Right  off"  he  picks 


"BORING  IN  "  FARTHER 


89 


the  beans,  then  powders  them  with  a  pestle,  then  shuts 
off  an  arm  of  his  river,  throwing  this  poison-powder 
therein,  then  in  half  an  hour,  behold  !  fifty  white-bellied 
fish  floating  dead  to  order  in  the  poisoned  pool.  Fish  we 
wanted,  and  fish  we  get.  But  not  now — by  no  means 
now. 


CHAPTER  VI 
Eastward  Ho ! 


"  I  hungered  for  Hell.  I  pushed  into  the  midst  of 
it  in  the  East  End  of  London.  For  days  I  stood  in 
those  seething  streets,  muddy  with  men  and  women, 
drinking  it  all  in  and  loving  it  all.  Yes,  I  loved  it 
because  of  the  souls  I  saw.  One  night  I  went  home 
and  said  to  my  wife :  '  Darling,  I  have  given  myself, 
I  have  given  you  and  our  children  to  the  service  of 
these  sick  souls.'  She  smiled  and  took  my  hand, 
and  we  knelt  down  together.  That  was  the  first 
meeting  of  the  Salvation  Army." 

General  Booth. 
«  •  « 

"  But  all  through  the  mountains,  thunder-riven, 

And  up  from  the  rocky  steep. 
There  arose  a  cry  to  the  gate  of  Heaven, 

•Rejoice!  I  have  found  My  sheep!' 
And  the  angels  echoed  around  the  throne, 
'Rejoice!  for  the  Lord  brings  back  His  own.'" 


CHAPTER  VI 


Eastward  Ho! 


N  whichy  at  las/,  the  reader  is  up  and 
off  over  the  Kwanza  River,  thereby 
taking   the  formal   "  header "   into  the 


Far  Interior. 


0  push  far  beyond  the  Kwanza  from  the  seaLoard 


means  that  vast  savannahs  are  encountered  tliat 


could  easily  swallow  a  hundred  missions.  Thousands 
of  miles  rolling  ahead,  and  all  guiltless  of  gates  and  hedges; 
a  land  that  could  swallow  up  millions  and  still  wait  open- 
mouthed  for  more.  Scarcely  one  lock  and  hey  in  the 
land,  the  usual  means  of  opening  a  door  being  the 
butt-end  of  a  gun.  Rather  like  Sir  Thomas  More's 
"  Utopia"  this  :  did  he  not  stipulate  that  no  door  in  his 
ideal  State  should  be  locked  ?  For  years  and  years,  fancy 
sleeping  with  unlocked  doors  in  Africa  :  how  does  this 
tickle  the  conceit  of  England  with  its  bolts  and  bars  ?  In 
one  backward  glance  you  see  that  England  as  a  parish  is 
only  a  spoilt  and  petted  child  of  privileged  preaching. 
Your  roots  are  merely  in  a  flower-pot,  and  not  in  a  real 
roomy  soil.    IIow  different  the  feeling  when  this  wide, 


7 


94 


THINKING  BLACK 


weary  Africa  begins  to  open  up  before  you  in  yawning 
expanses  of  Gospel  silence !  But  note  withal  a  curious 
thing.  This  advancing  into  Africa  seems  to  have  a 
strange  reciprocal  effect  on  a  new-comer.  Day  by  day, 
what  in  fact  is  happening  is  that  Africa  invades  you  a 
metaphoric  mile,  the  Dark  Continent  flooding  your  insular 
English  being  at  every  pore.  The  first  thing  to  haunt 
the  Missionary,  for  instance,  is  the  silent  sarcasm  in  the 
relative  disparity  of  mileage,  Africa  versus  England ;  and 
the  mental  map  you  find  yourself  making  of  the  huge 
land  has  always  at  the  bottom  corner  an  ironical  inset 
of  "  England  on  the  same  scale."  To  make  a  good  picture, 
remember,  you  must  come  back  far  enough  to  catch 
the  true  focus,  and  here  in  the  black  bush  we  certainly 
seem  to  see  our  tiny,  much-divided  England  in  true 
perspective. 

Let  me  say  it  a  second  time — that  16th  of  August  will 
ever  remain  a  red-letter  day  among  our  African  dates — 
we  crossed  the  Kwanza  River.  For  here  is  our  real 
Rubicon,  the  great  line  of  tribal  cleavage,  and  at  this 
point  we  take  the  technical  "header"  into  the  Far 
Interior.  So  sharp,  indeed,  this  line  of  demarcation 
that  the  first  native  you  meet  on  the  off-bank  is  labelled 
"a  heathen  or  Gentile"  by  his  own  pot-black  brother  the 
Bihean.  Ochingangela  is  the  term,  and  there  is  sting 
in  it.  Curious  solidarity  of  the  race  this  preaches,  for 
here  we  discover  the  black  sons  of  Adam  to  be  such  born 
Pharisees  that  each  African  tribe  thinks  its  neighbour 
only  a  coarse  "  Gentile "  mob.    Tit  for  tat,  right  across 


EASTWARD  HO! 


95 


Africa,  and  thence  right  round  the  globe,  these  taunt 
names  are  passed  along  the  line,  each  tribe  sporting  its 
rags  of  righteousness  at  the  expense  of  the  other.  Of 
course  it  is  always  the  next  man  who  is  the  alleged 
"  bad  'un,"  nay,  never,  never  No,  1.  The  Bihean  eats 
dogs,  and  the  Luban  eats  snails,  therefore  each  reviles 
the  other  on  this  touchy  point  of  tribal  diet.  The  true 
trade-mark  this,  of  all  negro  Pharisees — 

"  Compound  for  sins  they  are  inclined  to, 
By  hating  those  they  have  no  mind  to." 

The  Luban,  in  order  to  eat  man  more  comfortably,  calls 
outsiders  Vahemba ;  ask  him  if  he  eats  "man,"  and  he 
will  say,  "  Oh  no  !  I  do  not  eat  man  ;  I  only  eat  Vahemba." 
That  is  to  say,  only  the  Luban  is  a  man,  and  a  Gentile  a 
Muhemba.  No  random  idea  this  taunt  title,  if  you  please, 
for  you  may  choose  your  coast  of  entrance.  East  or  West, 
and  find  Africa  full  of  a  Pharisee  who  never  saw  Jerusalem. 
The  abrupt  first  day's  climb  of  the  West  Coast  or  the 
gradual  ascent  of  the  Zanzibar  side  in  the  East ;  yes, 
choose  either,  for  the  whole  world  is  akin.  First  comes 
the  sleek  Swahili  man,  as  black  and  as  negroid  as  any. 
Now  in  his  raw  estate  was  he  not  altogether  lighter  than 
vanity,  and  did  not  the  Arabs  from  Muscat  call  him  a 
Kaffir  ?  And  did  he  not  meekly  and  mildly  swallow  the 
dose  without  a  murmur  ?  And  being  immensely  pleased 
with  his  own  dear  self,  does  not  this  pride  in  himself  make 
the  usual  demand  on  the  "  other  "  man  ?  Therefore,  beine- 
a  Pharisee  of  tlie  good  old  international  stock,  he,  scorniuo- 


06 


THINKING  BLACK 


a  contaminating  touch,  dubs  all  Interior  natives  beyond 
the  pale  "  Wasenshi,"  the  flouting  glance  of  the  negro  eye 
being  the  best  lexicon-meaning  of  the  word. 

On  and  inward  we  travel,  following  our  "  will  o'  the 
wisp,"  ever  following  but  never  finding  the  "  heathen " 
man  of  our  quest.  The  Munyamweshi,  for  instance,  is 
ostensibly  one  of  Mr.  Arab's  "  Wasenshi,"  but  this  burly 
Interior  man  denies  identity  —  phew !  the  imaginary 
envelope  has  been  misdirected  evidently.  Take  this  man, 
now,  for  a  guide  to  find  the  unfindable  "  heathen  "  and 
note  what  befalls  you  on  the  westward  journey.  Himself 
called  a  Musenshi  by  the  snob  Swahili,  he  too  swallowed 
the  dose  meekly  as  mildly,  and  now  prepares  the  potion 
for  the  next  man.  Listen  to  this  often  chanted  word 
Munabuslii  he  is  using,  with  a  lordly  sweeping  gesture ; 
don't,  please,  yawn  as  I  teU  you  that  this  is  the  same  old 
sing-song  of  Pharisaism,  heathenising  everybody  except 
himself.  And  so  our  old  friend  "  Barbarian  "  rolls  on  and 
on,  black  tit  answering  black  tat  with  mournful  monotony, 
for  every  Roland  an  Oliver,  for  every  Quid  a  Quo.  What ! 
even  the  cannibals  ?  Yes,  even  the  Lubans  do  not  difier  ; 
for  across  their  Mupaka,  or  tribal  border,  they  throw  the 
epithet  "  uncircumcised  "  at  all  comers  ;  Muhemha!  is  the 
shot  they  fire  at  you. 

Reflection :  The  Missionary  in  preaching  does  not 
need  to  dig  up  the  famous  old  fossil  Pharisee  of  Jerusalem 
as  a  relic  of  antiquity.  He  has  the  real  and  genuine  thing 
all  around. 


EASTWARD  HO! 


97 


{25th  August.) 
Do  we  sleep  in  tents  ?  Nay,  but  we  creep  into  our 
tiny  grass  huts  at  sundown,  and  roll  out  our  rugs  on  a 
Robert-the-Bruce  mattress  of  fresh  grass  or  leaves.  Far, 
far  cosier  than  a  flapping  tent,  the  wildest  tornado  in  the 
night  roars  past,  leaving  you  snug  asleep  in  your  grass  den. 
Contrast  a  poor  "  Edgington  "  rocking  in  the  gale  like  a 
ship  at  sea,  the  fly  ballooning  in  the  breeze.  Besides,  the 
wild  wind  swishing  through,  with  the  rattle  of  the  rain  on 
the  tent,  rousing  you  out  of  sleep.  The  necessary  fireless- 
ness  of  a  tent,  too.  Therefore  for  snugness  plus  security 
plus  the  faggot  fire  in  it,  give  me  a  grass  hut.  In  a  few 
minutes  you  can  get  snug  with  the  knowledge  of  an  old 
campaigner,  and  your  weary  carriers  have  the  same  jaded 
joy.  I  heard  one  of  these  drop  his  load  at  sundown, 
saying  :— 

"  Hurrah  !  welcome,  0  night  I 
I  don't  need  to  carry  the  night." 

But  don't  misunderstand,  please ;  I  am  only  arguing  for  a 
roadside  hole  to  sleep  in,  and  not  a  house  as  domicile. 
For  years — and  more  of  this  anon  * — we  have  fought  the 
negro  on  this  housing  question  with  almost  incredibly 
successful  results.  Their  average  beehive  hut  is  a 
vcrmiuating  hole,  a  den  of  disease,  and  indeed  the  most 
valuable  characteristic  of  that  heathen  hut  is  just  this 
impossibility  of  living  in  it :  it  drives  you  into  the  fresh 
air.  Prefer  the  hut,  and  you  will  be  bitten  all  night  ))y 
large  fat         but  need  we  discuss  the  exact  zoological 

'  See  p.  445  post. 


98 


THINKING  BLACK 


designation  of  these  creatures  ?  These  pests  are  legion, 
and  what  with  our  own  creeping  pace  of  travel  by  day, 
coupled  with  these  other  creeping  things  by  night,  I 
dreamed  two  nights  in  succession  a  curious  jumble  of 
a  dream — a  vision  this  of  a  large  roomy  railway  station 
placarded  all  over  with  monster  advertisements,  "  Keating's 
Powder."  The  railway,  one  opines,  stood  for  a  rebuke  to 
our  caravan's  creeping  pace,  and  "  Keating's  "  was — well, 
for  the  other  creepers. 

But  "  he  jests  at  scars  who  never  felt  a  wound,"  and  I 
would  hereby  emphasise  the  fact  that  a  tent  is  next  to 
necessary  for  the  inclemencies  of  the  rainy  season  travel. 
Even  as  early  as  the  9th  of  July  surprise  rains  caught  me 
in  a  forest  with  not  a  yard  of  canvas  for  cover  and  not  one 
straw  of  grass  for  a  thatch.  The  annual  grass  fires  only 
the  other  day  had  roared  through  the  land,  licking  up 
every  stock  of  long  grass  suitable  for  hut-thatching — 
all,  all  swept  oflF  the  face  of  the  country,  only  green 
leaves  remaining,  under  which  we  crouch  for  shelter. 
Down  pours  that  ruthless  rain,  until  the  most  promising 
of  fires  soon  goes  clean  out, — first  red,  then  yellow,  then 
the  bleak  little  blue  flames,  your  firewood  finally  ceasing 
to  smoke.  What  next  ? — muse  on  your  miseries  ?  Why,  of 
course,  sing  : — 

"  It  ain't  no  use  to  grumble  or  complain, 
'Tis  just  as  cheap  and  easy  to  rejoice ; 
When  God  sorts  out  the  weather  and  sends  rain, 
Why !  rain's  my  choice." 

However,  even  an  African  cannot  sing  for  eight  hours, 


EASTWARD  HO! 


99 


and  in  fact,  a  few  hours  later,  misery  is  depicted  on  his 
plucky  black  face,  for  he  sees  no  prospect  of  an  evening 
meal  ahead.  Everything  for  miles  around  soaked  and  as 
unignitable  as  asbestos.  Caught  in  the  rain,  and  five 
miles  in  the  rear,  my  poor  old  bed-man  is  sounding  the 
depths  of  desolation,  crouching  under  a  leaky  umbrella- 
like tree,  the  dark  night  settling  down  on  him  in  the 
cheerless  forest,  sans  fire,  sans  food,  sans  hope.  Philo- 
sopher to  the  last,  this  old  man  could  even  defend  that 
pertinacious  pour  lashing  him  in  fury.  "  We  had  a 
race  for  it,"  said  he,  "the  rain  and  I,  but  the  rain  got 
home  first."  This  July  downpour,  however,  is  quite  rare, 
and  the  Garenganze  rule  is  that  only  after  October  the 
African  sky  is  too  damp  a  ceiling  to  sleep  under.  Blue, 
serenely  blue,  for  a  solid  six  months,  here  is  a  sky  never 
once  out  of  temper,  never  once  sulky  and  sour  like  your 
English  one. 

Have  we  tinned  provisions  ?  Not  a  box.  We  make 
old  Africa  produce  its  coarse  meal — remarkable  neither 
for  its  quantity  nor  quality — and  nolens  volens,  on  this 
repellent  "mush"  one  dares  to  dine.  No  cook  on  earth 
could  make  what  might  be  indulgently  called  a  loaf  out 
of  this  meal,  and  in  order  to  manipulate  that  sodden  cereal 
properly  what  was  needed  was  the  far  subtler  mysteries 
of  a  magician,  not  a  cook.  (Ladies  may  well  smile  at  this 
statement,  for  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  deft  white  fingers 
of  the  first  lady  to  penetrate  the  Interior  made  delectable 
pancakes  with  this  very  meal  !)  With  a  daily  diet  cut 
down  almost  to  the  level  of  a  black  slave's,  our  imperious 


100 


THINKING  BLACK 


appetite  makes  us  long  to  seize  this  Africa  by  the  throat 
and  wring  a  few  of  its  menu  secrets  from  it.  But,  alas  ! 
Africa,  beyond  the  boast  of  a  heady,  frothy  beer,  has  no 
culinary  secrets  to  hide.  In  later  days  another  of  the 
impatient  expedients  was  the  boiling  of  triumphant  bush 
dumplings,  "  Jack  Horners,"  for  if  you  put  in  your  thumb 
you  could  not  pull  out  the  proverbial  plum.  "  Go  to  !  let  us 
have  a  '  sinker,'  "  was  the  pathetic  prophecy  of  indigestion 
ahead.  Nevertheless,  ours  it  is  even  here  to  build  an 
Ebcnczer  by  each  of  these  cookery  cannon-balls,  and  to 
record  thankfully  that  we  who  did  partake  of  them  are 
still  alive  and  well.  So  unlike  Paul  in  all  our  other 
ways,  it  is  delightful  for  us  to  think  that  just  here  we 
have  stolen  a  march  on  him — I  mean  that,  unlike  our- 
selves, Paul  never  left  his  natal  climate  zone  or  average 
national  dietary. 

{26th  August.) 
Day  by  day,  this  African  looking  through  you  like 
glass.  Day  by  day,  that  relentless  negro  stare.  Thus 
you  see  us  confronted  with  a  painful  and  even  awful 
aspect  of  this  winning  of  first-generation  Africans  for 
Christ  :  I  mean  the  innocent  way  they  take  you  for  their 
walking  and  talking  Bible  :  "an  epistle,  known  and  read 
of  all  men."  They  read  you  off  like  a  page  of  large  easy 
print  and  come  to  quick  calculating  conclusions.  At  least 
Mr.  Aboriginal  has  two  eyes  in  his  head,  and  behind  the 
said  eyes  he  lias  just  enough  brains  to  suspect  that  a 
Missionary's  life  and  lips  should  agree.  "  So  we  preached 
and  so  ye  believed  "  is  only  half  of  the  story,  for  they  copy 


EASTWARD  HO! 


101 


you  in  toto,  the  very  gesture  and  the  twang  reproduced 
with  a  fearful  fidelity.  Quite  unconscious  of  the  trend  of 
the  thing,  you  have  in  Africa  hundreds  of  little  groups 
who  are  unwittingly  "  the  Smithites  "  and  "  the  Jonesites  " 
and  "  the  Brownites,"  according  to  the  varying  names  and 
fads  of  their  various  and  varying  Missionaries. 

*  m  * 

A  vile  negro  calling  you  "  0  Lord  God  ! "  is  a 
reminder  that  the  deepest  wound  a  Missionary  regularly 
receives  in  Africa  is  when  his  good  is  evil  spoken  of. 
Take  the  late  sainted  Benjamin  Cobbe  as  an  example. 
Here  was  a  holy  man  sent  from  God,  if  ever  God  sent  a 
man  to  the  Garenganze.  Welcoming  him  to  the  country, 
I  met  him  at  the  Lualaba  crossing,  a  white,  fragile-looking 
traveller,  with  a  Pauline  gleam  in  his  eye.  "  Have  come 
to  pay  my  debt ! "  said  he,  with  a  winning  smile,  and 
there  you  have  the  whole  story  in  two  words — that  white 
fever  face  trying,  but  failing,  to  kill  that  glad  smile. 
This  Africa  of  ours,  mark  you,  is  far  too  captious  on  the 
subject  of  what  kind  of  body  you  bring  into  it — the  same 
sorry  Africa  that  cares  not  one  little  bit  whether  you 
have  a  soul  at  all. 

And  so,  short  and  sharp  was  the  course  Cobbe  ran, 
for  it  is  quite  true  what  the  forest  proverb  says  :  "  The 
straightest  trees  are  the  first  felled."  Calm  and  cultured, 
he  was  not  one  of  the  boisterous  "  Oh-be- joyful !  "  sort  of 
saint,  yet  did  he  walk  with  God,  and  got  the  heavenly 
face.  His  motto  was :  "To  grow  up,  you  must  grow 
down";  and  a  fine  thing,  indeed,  God  got  out  of  hini. 


102  THINKING  BLACK 

Watch  the  sequel.  This  holy  man,  if  you  please,  had 
drunk  so  deeply  of  God's  wine  of  joy — the  new  wine  that 
came  to  him  last  in  life — that  it  kept  him  going  at  high 
pressure  right  on  to  the  end.  The  new  wine,  in  fact,  was 
busily  at  work  breaking  up  his  old  bottle  of  a  body,  for 
when  these  two  meet  in  Africa  then  one  of  the  two  must 
be  lost,  but  that  one  thing  will  never  be  the  new  wine — 
that  is  hid  with  Christ  in  God.  So  the  fragrant  saint 
died  at  his  post,  the  "  old  skin  bottle  "  broken  in  a  ferment 
of  fever.  Africa  got  the  holy  dust,  and  God  received  him 
into  glory.  He  foresaw  it  all — saw  certain  death  ahead, 
yet  resolved  to  pay  his  debt  to  the  heathen.  So  endeth 
Phase  No.  1. 

Now,  far  from  this  being  a  de  mortuis  nil  nisi  honum 
panegyric,  here  we  come  to  the  curious  sequel.  I  have 
called  his  a  fragrant  life  ;  but  as  the  years  passed  it  began 
to  dawn  on  us  that  the  perfume  of  Mr.  Cobbe's  piety  had 
stolen  far  out  beyond  our  sphere.  That  gleam  of  the  life 
eternal  so  often  seen  to  shoot  out  of  his  hazel  eyes  was  far 
more  eloquent  than  long-winded  speech.  And,  travelling 
one  day  in  Lubaland,  I  was  appalled  to  find  out  that  a 
negro,  whom  I  met,  had  promoted  Mr.  Cobbe  to  the 
literal  rank  of  a  "  god."  Mter  a  few  exploring  remarks, 
I  ferreted  out  from  the  sealed  sanctuary  of  his  black 
breast  a  little  private  scheme  of  salvation  he  had  concocted 
for  his  own  particular  benefit. 

And  thus,  even  thus,  did  the  uncanny  thing  run. 

Yes,  he  had  known  Mr.  Cobbe  in  the  old  days — 
fragrant  and  holy  in  word  and  deed.    The  memory  of 


EASTWARD  HO! 


103 


the  heavenly  things  he  saw  in  this  saint  never  left  that 
negro,  and  away  he  went  back  to  Lubaland  with  "  the 
living  epistle"  graven  on  his  mind.  "Look  up,  for  we 
are  going  up — and  oh,  so  soon  ! "  was  a  fond  phrase  of 
Cobbe's,  so  this  negro  thought  much  and  long,  and  knew 
that  the  saint  had  really  gone  to  God.  That  thing  he 
had  actually  seen  in  him  could  not  be  killed  by  fever. 
He  had  only  died  into  glory  as  the  stars  die  at  sunrise. 
Hence  the  daring  idea  of  this  poor  benighted  soul  to 
evolve  a  private  religion  of  his  own  with  Mr.  Cobbe  as 
central  "saviour."  "Ah  !  "  said  the  negro,  "when  I  am 
in  a  fix  in  life  this  is  w^hat  I  do,  I  just  send  up  a  prayer 
to  Bwanna  Cobbe  as  mediator,  and  he  will  arrange  it,  for 
he  has  a  big  say  with  God."  "He  will  pass  it  along  to 
God ;  he  will  have  a  big  say  with  God  !  "  Of  course,  I 
righted  his  wTong  theology.  Of  course,  I  deplored  and 
implored  that  this  was  the  unkindest  cut  of  all — that  this 
was  stabbing  him,  not  kissing  him.  But  oh !  the  bitter- 
sweet reflection  notwithstanding — this  that  a  mere  dust- 
to-dust  man  should  be  chosen  as  a  daysman  between  God 
and  his  soul:  "  a  living  epistle" — a  walking  and  talking 
Bible.  They  saw — may  I  dare  the  phrase  ? — the  gleam 
of  the  life  eternal  .shooting  out  of  his  honest  hazel  eyes  ; 
they  saw,  I  say,  and  they  believed  in  a  man  of  God. 
How  much  more  will  they  believe  in  the  Man  in  the 
Glory,  the  Man  who  is  Jehovah's  Fellow  ? 

Little  wonder  that  Paul  could  even  hope  that  "  much 
more  in  his  absence  "  the  young  church  of  Philippi  would 
prosper,  for,  like  many  an  African  Missionary,  might  not 


104 


THINKING  BLACK 


Paul's  princely  personality  attract  too  much  of  their  gaze  ? 
Is  this,  too,  the  reason  why  Philip  and  the  first  negro  con- 
vert of  this  dispensation  were  so  quickly  separated  from 
each  other  ?  At  least  neither  Paul  nor  Philip  gave  them 
a  wrong  start  by  permitting  them  to  think  that  they 
could  lean  on  them  long,  for  they  soon  left  their  young 
converts.  Certainly  too  much  coddling  of  converts  on 
the  Mission  Stations  has  fostered  sickliness  of  soul,  the 
flippant  defence  of  many  a  backsliding  black  at  the  mines 
or  Bulawayo  being  that  because  there  is  no  Mission  there 
can  be  no  godliness.  This  poor  parroty  brand  of  black 
is,  alas  !  too  common,  and  resembles  the  famous  parrot 
out  on  the  Tanganyika  Plateau  who  changed  masters  and 
manners  twice.  No.  1  was  a  trader  who  taught  the 
bird  to  swear,  and  No.  2  a  Missionary  who  taught  him  to 
sing,  poor  Poll  muddling  up  the  swearing  and  the  sing- 
ing in  his  old  age — out  of  the  same  mouth  blessing  and 
cursing  ;  therewith  blessed  he  God,  therewith  cursed  he 
men.  Like  Eowland  Hill  and  the  drunken  man  who  said 
to  him,  "  I'm  one  of  your  converts."  "  I  believe  you,"  was 
Rowland's  arch  reply,  "you  look  like  my  bungling  work." 
Far  from  such  negroes  having  no  religion,  their  Mission 
veneer  proclaims  them  to  have  too  much  of  it — in  fact, 
the  only  sensible  thing  is  to  tell  them  that  if  their  religion 
does  not  change  them,  they  should  change  it.  For  if 
prayer  does  not  surely  make  an  African  leave  off  sinning, 
will  not  sinning  surely  make  him  leave  off  praying  ? 
Ignoring  Christ's  rule  of  sending  out  His  disciples  two  by 
two,  these  renegades  generally  go  off  alone  and  pay  the 


A   TYPICAL   SOLDIER'S  WIFE. 


EASTWARD  HO! 


105 


penalty.  For  the  same  wind  that  blows  out  a  candle, 
only  fans  two  faggots  into  a  flame,  and  wisdom  is  thus 
justified  of  her  children, 

(Later.) 

Hats  off  to  the  African  lady,  she — brave  heart ! — is  a 
wonder.  Undeniably  she  is  stamped  sterling.  The 
negro  may  laugh  at  a  woman  because  she  has  a  few 
ounces  less  brain  than  a  man,  but  very  often  the  daughter 
of  Eve  makes  up  in  muscle  what  she  lacks  in  mind. 
Witness,  a  woman  at  the  salt-pans  who  killed  her  lion  as 
deftly  as  a  man,  howbeit  the  method  was  quite  a  la  Mrs. 
Beeton.  Out  on  the  salt-pans  the  big  earthenware  pots 
are  kept  boiling  all  night,  with  someone  lying  out  to  tend 
the  fire.  A  widow  she  happened  to  be.  Past  midnight  the 
fires  had  gone  low,  and  the  lonely  watcher  awoke  from  her 
doze  to  see  a  large  lion  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  pot 
proposing  to  grab  her.  Slightly  scared  as  all  lions  are  at 
a  blinking  fire,  this  very  delay  on  the  beast's  part  was  the 
widow's  choice  opportunity.  Well,  and  what  did  that 
homely  housewife  do  if  not  drench  the  lion  with  the 
scalding  salt  water — yes,  drenched  it  dead  !  Mrs.  Beeton 
could  not  have  given  clearer  instructions  how  to  scald 
and  salt  a  prize  lion,  and  she  was  a  local  Luban  heroine 
for  a  week. 

But  that  is  only  incident  No.  1,  and  the  curious  coin- 
cidence of  the  second  affair  is  that  a  woman  and  her 
water-pot  are  again  the  central  facts  of  the  history.  This, 
too,  is  a  woman  whose  life  is  under  a  cloud  :  witness  her 
slinking  off  after  sundown  to  draw  water  from  the  well. 


106 


THINKING  BLACK 


Late  hours,  though,  in  Africa  have  their  penalty,  and  just 
as  she  stooped  down  into  the  well  to  draw  water,  behold  ! 
as  in  a  mirror  her  own  face  in  the  same  reflection  with  a 
leopard's.  It  all  happened  in  the  lightning  glance  of  an 
eye,  the  leopard  on  the  other  side  starting  to  spring  on 
her  at  the  simultaneous  second  when  she  saw  his  head 
mirrored  with  her  own  in  the  same  pool.  (And,  re- 
member, the  only  shield  and  buckler  she  possessed  was 
Mrs.  Beeton's  glory,  a  housewife's  water-pot.)  Well, 
happily  for  the  poor  woman,  she  instinctively,  on  the 
edge  of  the  well,  covered  her  body  with  this  homely 
utensil  to  break  the  leopard's  spring  across.  And  not  in 
vain.  The  success  of  this  manoeuvre  was  triumphant. 
Just  enough  to  cow  the  beast  a  very  little,  this  little 
meant  such  a  lot  that  the  leaping  leopard  missed  a  foot- 
hold by  one  important  inch,  fell  down  the  well  with  a 
splash — and  now  there  is  more  need  for  the  water-pot 
than  ever.  Thus  begins  a  long  game  of  hide  and  seek, 
woman  above  and  leopard  down  that  well.  Once,  twice, 
twenty  times,  the  woman  and  the  leopard  played  at  blind 
man's  buflf  down  the  hole,  and  every  time  the  beast  at- 
tempts to  climb  the  well,  this  negro  Mrs.  Beeton  claps 
her  water-pot  over  the  mouth  of  the  pit,  thus  cowing  her 
enemy.  All  the  time,  of  course,  she  has  been  shrieking 
in  the  direction  of  the  village,  and  at  last  some  men  run- 
ning up  reward  her  bravery  in  the  spearing  of  the  wild 
beast.  Yet  this  woman  had  only  2  lbs.  12  oz.  of  brain  as 
against  the  men's  3  lbs.  2  oz.,  but  the  margin  lacking  in 
brain  she  made  up  in  biceps. 


EASTWARD  HO! 


107 


{29th  August.) 
Heat  increasing  as  we  push  on  and  in,  the  quicksilver 
hurrying  up  the  glass  towards  grill  heat  by  10  a.m.  At 
daybreak  taking  up  of  the  fragments  of  supper  that 
remain  a  pocketful,  we  are  off  on  the  wings  of  the 
morning,  pushing  far  ahead  of  our  crawling  caravan. 
Chancing  on  a  rippling  river  intercepting  the  trail,  you 
sit  down  on  the  shiny,  moss-covered  bank  and  perform  a 
much  more  serious  toilet  than  your  fugitive  cat's  lick  in 
the  dark  camp.  (N.B. — A  tooth-brush  over  a  running 
stream,  this  is  the  cream  of  all  tramp  joys.)  Then,  at 
last,  behold  our  crawling  caravan  emerge  from  a  hurst, 
the  Union  Jack  bearer  leading  the  way.  As  we  have 
given  them  the  slip  and  pushed  on  betimes,  this  is  our 
first  encounter  with  our  own  men,  so  when  the  Indian 
file  marches  past  each  man  has  his  morning  to  give, 
followed  by  some  droll  remark.  Then  one  perchance 
starts  a  song,  the  whole  line  of  leathery  lungs  taking  up 
the  howling  chorus  :  this  particularly  when  at  the  end  of 
a  long  fagging  journey.  Sirs !  what  singing,  the  whole 
harmony  not  unlike  the  tune  with  which  a  rusty  old 
coal-cart  tries  to  solace  itself  when  crawling  down  a  hill. 

How  do  we  travel,  you  ask  ?  Have  we  carts  or  horses 
or  donkeys  ?  No,  we  have  none  of  these,  howbeit  a  kind 
English  lady  was  so  concerned  about  our  delays  that  she 
asked  the  touching  question  :  "  Did  the  wheel  of  your 
cart  stick  in  the  mud  ? "  Alas  !  the  only  "  cart-wheel  " 
we  have  to  do  with  is  the  aforesaid  rut  of  that  name,  and 
a  few  months  of  this  gipsying  on  the  road  makes  you 


108 


THINKING  BLACK 


agree  with  Ruskin  that  railway  travelling  is  not  travelling 
at  all.  It  is  merely  being  sent  to  a  place,  and  very  little 
different  from  becoming  a  parcel.  Your  alternative  to 
tramping  it  is  a  lazy  lotus  life  in  a  Portuguese 
machila,  wherein  dozing  is  the  retrograde  rule. 
Bowling  along  in  your  carriage  and  six  (hammock  and 
six  stalwarts)  while  the  honest  blacks  are  sweating  it  out. 
Although  a  good  ambulance  arrangement,  this  humbling 
hammock  can  easily  make  a  man  as  lazy  as  he  is  limp  and 
lifeless.  On  the  contrary,  marching  under  vertical  rays 
is  delightful  up  to  the  sixth  hour.  When,  however,  you 
push  for  a  camp  eight  hours  oflf,  all  the  pleasure  goes  out 
of  a  tramp  after  that  solemn  sixth  hour.  The  lovely 
glimpses  of  the  picturesque  in  the  earlier  and  brighter 
hours  all  vanish,  leaving  you  dull  and  dead,  a  mere  walk- 
ing machine,  unpleasantly  conscious  of  a  hole  in  one  sock, 
and  discussing  in  your  hot  head  how  far  to  camp. 


CHAPTER  VII 
"Own  Up  and  Pay  Up" 


"Christ  the  Son  of  God  hath  sent  me 
Through  the  midnight  lands, 
Mine  the  mighty  ordination 
Of  the  pierced  hands." 

«  •  * 

"  All  Christians  are  altogether  priests ;  and  let  it  be 
anathema  to  assert  there  is  any  other  priest  than  he 
who  is  a  Christian ;  for  it  will  be  asserted  without 
the  Word  of  God,  on  no  authority  but  the  sayings 
of  men,  or  the  antiquity  of  custom,  or  the  multitude 
of  those  that  think  so." 

Luther. 

•  «  • 

"You  might  as  well  attempt  to  measure  the  moon 
for  a  suit  of  clothes  as  tell  what  sect  some  belong  to." 

George  Whitefield. 


no 


I 


CHAPTER  VII 


Own  Up  and  Pay  Up  " 

HEREIN  the  reader  continues 
the  perilous  process  called 
"  boring  in,''  and  encounters  along  the 
trail  sundry  sons  of  Belial. 

BUT  how  ridiculous  all  this  trekking  seems  in  retro- 
spect, when  we  see  to-day  this  same  Central  Africa 
quickly  becoming  a  gridiron  of  railways.  Against 
our  weary  retrospect  of  thirty-two  months  from  England 
to  the  Garenganze,  Sir  Douglas  Fox  now  offers  a  prospect 
of  three  days  to  the  same  goal  from  Benguella.  Ah  me, 
as  the  curtain  of  memory  lifts,  it  is  incredible  to  think 
that  within  two  decades  the  pant  and  puff  of  the  red-eyed 
engine  will  be  heard  rumbling  along  our  old  trail.  And, 
remember,  we  are  told  that  double  band  of  steel  linkingr 
the  Ocean  with  the  Katanga  will  mean  the  commercial- 
traveller  stage  of  existence — ambassadors  for  Canadian 
whisky,  Scotch  tweeds,  English  marmalade,  packed  in 
the  sweltering  carriages  and  making  the  country  hum. 
Not  far  down  our  Congo  the  very  cannibals  who  hurled 

clouds  of  arrows  against  Stanley's  canoes  are  to-day  them- 
8 


112 


THINKING  BLACK 


selves  firemen  and  engineers  of  the  river  steamboats, 
perspiring  over  their  engines  with  lumps  of  cotton  waste 
in  their  strong  dirty  hands.  Malemba  was  one  of  them, 
and  I  chatted  with  him  to-day  in  our  lingua  franca, 
Swahili. 

August.) 

Watershed  country  as  it  is  about  here,  this  means 
that  the  rivers  have  not  yet  time  and  place  enough 
to  form  yawning  ravines,  consequently  bridging  is  easy 
and  almost  nominal.  Dead  level  as  the  land  looks,  you 
soon  discover  that  this  very  flatness  is  a  mere  artifice 
and  trickery.  For  here,  under  your  very  nose,  great 
river-systems  are  silently  worming  away  in  diametric 
directions ;  here  is  cradled  the  mighty  Congo  of  the 
future  ;  here,  too,  slumbers  the  source  of  the  Zambezi :  so 
hypocritically  small  here,  so  haughty  yonder.  To  a 
Missionary  there  is  Gospel  as  well  as  Geography  in  all 
this,  the  same  Gospel  I  preached  later  on  when  crossing 
Kundelungu  Range.  Sharp  on  the  watershed  I  halted 
my  men  and  preached  a  three  minutes'  appeal — a  short 
enough  sermon,  but  if  they  practise  all  I  preached  they 
will  find  it  long  enough.  Standing  by  a  tree,  I  showed 
them  how  one  half  of  the  branches  dripped  rain  that 
flowed  far  West,  while  the  Eastern  branches  shed  away  to 
the  Luapula.  And  there  you  have  the  very  pointed 
moral  of  their  position,  as  good  theologically  as  geographi- 
cally— every  man  of  them  standing  on  the  watershed  of 
life  and  called  upon  to  make  an  irrevocable  choice  :  one 
momentous  move  this  way  or  that  meaning  endless  joy  or 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP  " 


113 


endless  woe.  Of  all  the  dunces  beneath  the  patient 
heavens  there  is  none  like  the  man  who  denies  that  the 
Gospel  of  God  is  Africa's  true  solace  and  salvation.  Here 
is  a  man  who  says  he  has  gone  to  the  extreme  of  sin,  and 
here  is  a  Missionary  saying  that  Christ  has  gone  to  the 
extreme  of  atonement.  What  more  does  the  sinner  want  ? 
What  more  does  the  Saviour  ? 

The  villages  encountered  are  still  of  the  same  vermin- 
ating  pattern  first  met  near  the  Coast.    As  clearly  as  the 
shell  of  a  snail  indicates  its  species,  so  the  Chokwe  ^  has 
his  typical  hut.    Having  no  chimney,  his  roof  is  a  long 
needle-pointed  spire,  their  protest  this  against  the  smoke 
blearing  their  eyes.     Hence  height  of  roof  to  induce  the 
smoke  to  curl  up  inside,  not  outside,  the  cone.  Experience 
grows,  however,  and  you  soon  see  that  more  than  mere 
sounds  of  the  forest  are  invading  the  negro  home.  For 
taking  another  glance  out  of  his  ash-heap  of  a  kraal,  this 
time,  your  nude  negro  saw,  or  rather  did  not  see,  one 
straight  line  in  Nature,  so  once  again  out  of  sheer  servile 
allegiance  to  his  Nature-creed  the  crooked  negro  has  a 
crooked  town,  the  black  beehive  huts  scattered  all  over 
in  a  most  random  manner.    Now,  as  that  hut  is  itself 
only  a  clump  of  cut  trees  tied  together  with  bark  ropes, 
even  so  he  still  drags  in  forest  ideas  into  the  stockade,  and 
the  haphazard  growth  of  a  clump  of  trees  is  the  planless 
maze  of  this  grass  town.    A  lighted  arrow  shot  into  the 
place  would  send  it  up  in  a  blaze. 

*  Some  years  later  the  first  to  open  in  Cliokwe  were  our  Ainericnn  friends 
MeBflrs.  Loutitt,  Maitland,  and  Dr.  Morey.  Then  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Taylor  and 
others  followed  and  began  farther  North. 


114 


THINKING  BLACK 


That  old-as-Adam  circular  hut  of  his,  be  it  noted, 
is  the  seed  plot  of  all  his  "  thinking  black  "  ideas,  for  when 
natives  gather  in  a  meeting  they  crowd  in  a  circle ;  then, 
in  true  sarcastic  sequence,  they  think  and  talk  in  a  circle. 
The  eye  is  circle  No.  1,  and  looking  out  on  the  landscape 
of  life  it  is  a  case  of  like  eye,  like  landscape,  360°  every 
time.  He  rambles  round  in  a  circle  of  speech  in  the  same 
way  as  he  sees  the  circularity  of  seasons  in  Nature,  or  the 
day  and  night  cycle  of  sleeping  and  waking.  His  carved 
stools  and  utensils  are  all  circular,  and  he  borrows  from 
Nature  the  idea  that  rotundity  is  the  only  safe  shape  of 
things.  A  chief  argued  with  me  for  a  week  that  by 
making  a  square  house  I  had  at  once  created  four  points 
of  near  or  remote  breakage — a  circle  has  no  weak  point, 
so  he  argued.  The  fact  is  the  whole  prospective  puzzle 
in  connection  with  our  black  man  is,  how  to  make  him,  a 
round  peg,  fit  into  the  square  hole  of  civilisation.  You 
go  roaming  around  Africa  sighing  for  one  straight  line 
and  lo  !  you  find  it  not — a  parable  all  this  of  black  morals 
as  well  as  of  black  men. 

{Blst  August.) 
The  sun-baked  trail  stretching  ahead  is  still  going  due 
East  like  a  long  snake,  twisting  and  turning  now  to  the 
right  now  to  the  left  with  a  whole  foot-path  philosophy 
in  the  thing.  Nor  would  you  prefer  it  severely  straight 
like  a  Roman  road,  for  this  corkscrew  with  its  secrets 
ahead  possesses  all  the  pleasure  that  is  born  of  accident 
and  surprise.  You  turn  an  ant-hill  and  know  not  what 
will  confront  you  ;  squeeze  through  scrub,  then  out,  pit-a- 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP  "  115 

pat  with  expectancy,  on  a  green  grassy  glade.    You  know 
not  what  is  ahead,  nor  do  you  want  to.    Here  your  "  think- 
ing black"  negro  moralises  once  more,  and  insists  that 
this  track  of  ours  is  like  the  way  and  walk  of  life.  The 
veil  that  covers  the  face  of  futurity  is  woven  by  the  hand 
of  mercy.    If  you  knew  a  month's  happening  ahead,  you 
would  grow  grey  in  a  single  night.    Day  by  day  in  this 
same  cart-wheel  rut,  however,  has  a  curious  effect  on  you 
the  traveller :  it  gets  on  your  brain,  precisely  as  this 
sinuous  trail  has  made  an  equally  sinuous  African.  He 
gets  a  twist  too.    With  chameleon  consistency  the  negro 
has  utterly  become  like  his  own  zigzag  path ;  it  is  his 
way  of  doing  things  as  well  as  his  way  of  walking.  In 
speaking — say — this  slippery  native  can  only  twist  in  and 
out  of  an  idea  precisely  as  he  twists  along  his  path  : 
"  Going,  I  went,  and  speaking,  I  spoke,  and  doing,  I  did," 
being  the  average  formula  of  your  wriggly  black.  An 
adjacent  lion  is  called  a  "  dog,"  and  a  friend  asking  a 
friend  to  drink  beer  is  vaguely  invited  to  drink  "  water." 
Hence  the  famous  fact  that  our  son  of  Ham  will  never 
come  straight  to  the  point,  but  hedges  and  temporises — 
"  meandering  to  the  point "  he  calls  it.    Depend  upon  it, 
too,  this  gentleman  has  got  to  learn  that  a  straight  line 
is  the  shortest  in  morals  as  in  mathematics  :  is  not  their 
twisted  itinerary  exactly  like  their  twisted  morals  ?  Why, 
for  example,  is  it  that  your  savage  prefers  to  take  a  long, 
roundabout  way  in  murdering  his  man,  lingering  and 
lavishing  the  finest  touches  of  the  art  of  murder  on  him  ? 
Round  the  corner  of  the  cook-house  you  can  catch  Mr. 


116 


THINKING  BLACK 


Chef  excruciatingly  murdering  your  supper  fowl,  plucking 
it  while  yet  alive.  The  same  boy's  father,  too,  in  killing 
a  prisoner  would  with  a  refinement  of  cruelty  insist  on 
first  digging  out  the  heart.  The  same  devious  course  of 
devilry  is  seen  when  they  catch  an  eagle  raiding  the 
chickens.  Oh  yes,  they  release  the  captured  culprit, 
but  it  is  only  with  one  leg  cut  off",  one  eye  gouged  out, 
then  away  the  regal  bird  flies  in  misery,  maimed  for  life. 
Yet  so  daring  are  these  vultures  that,  at  Molenga's,  one 
successfully  swooped  down  on  the  plate  passing  only  a  few 
yards  from  cook-house  to  table  and  carried  off  the  savoury 
meat  thereon  ! 

*  *  * 

What  next  ?    The  ex  post  facto  Chokwe  "  hungry 
country"  is  a  relative  joy  compared  with  the  treat- 
ment we  receive  from  the  Luvale  people.    The  staple 
product  of  this  road-blocking  tribe  is  a  wealth  of  Rob 
Roy  bandits  who  live  on  loot.    Squeezing  through  the 
grass  is  a  small  concern  compared  with  squeezing  past 
these  stand-and-deliver  rufiians.    This  is  what  the  phrase 
"  boring    in "   means.     Small    ragamuffin  sovereigns, 
let  us  call  them,  generally  this  type  of  negro  is  the 
greasiest  and  the  dirtiest  that  ever  defied  soap.    "  Water 
rots  the  skin,"  is  their  saying.    Samikilenge  at  Peho  is 
the  worst  of  the  gang,  then  comes  Kalunga  Kameya,  and 
then  old  Kangombe.    Every  man  of  them  nurses  a  private 
grievance  and  demands  "  cash  down  "  for  seeing  the  light 
of  His  Majesty's  countenance.    Most  of  their  towns,  too, 
more  prominent  on  the  map  than  on  the  planet  earth. 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP" 


117 


To  judge  from  their  dirty  appearance  they  seem,  at  one 
time,  all  to  have  suflfered  from  hydrophobia  and  never 
completely  recovered  from  the  dread  of  water  then  in- 
spired. These  and  many  more  form  a  band  of  black 
rogues  who  fatten  on  honest  men  :  witness  Livingstone 
in  these  very  latitudes  in  1854  and  his  perilous  plight. 
By  way  of  temporising,  a  common  proposal  from  these 
road-blockers  is  a  delay  of  some  days  for  the  Kasendo,  or 
blood  covenant  of  friendship,  between  the  travellers  and 
the  lord  paramount,  a  mere  trick  this,  of  course,  "  to 
bleed  us  "  in  a  dear  double  sense.  The  idea  of  this  one- 
sided covenant  as  unfolded  is  a  sort  of  "  Mutual  Accommo- 
dation Society  Limited,"  and  I  assure  you  it  is  limited 
— strictly  so — our  upstart  Chief  being  sole  beneficiary  : 
he  wants  everything,  even  a  literal  suck  of  your  blood. 
Every  few  miles  means  a  new  embarrassing  case  of  a 
blatant  Kinglet  demanding  your  money  or  your  life,  yet 
most  of  these  nobodies  only  dreamed  in  one  night  they 
were  kings,  their  proof  of  regal  succession  being  as  weak 
and  visionary  as  that  of  the  Pope  being  the  fabled 
successor  of  Peter.  But  patience  must  be  your  pet  virtue 
in  Africa,  remember,  and  now,  oh  now,  is  the  time  to 
produce  your  pet.  Calico  and  beads  are  their  £  s.  d.,  but 
mere  current  coinage  is  the  least  and  last  thing  in  their 
despotic  demands.  Our  prudent  shabbiness,  in  fact,  is  a 
necessary  boon  ;  for  they  want  our  boots,  want  our  shirts, 
yea,  they  must  have  the  only  iron  cooking-pot  we  possess 
— perhaps.  And  all  this  under  splitting  vertical  rays, 
the  precious  dry  season  quickly  speeding  past  with  our 


118 


THINKING  BLACK 


Garenganze  goal  yet  a  long  way  off.  These  fine  folks  do 
not  measure  time  by  means  of  little  machines  carried  in 
their  pockets.  No  need  in  this  easy  land  to  catch  train 
or  tram  by  a  fraction  of  a  second.  There  is  not  one  time- 
piece in  the  vast  country,  their  only  watch  and  eight-day 
clock  being  the  accurate  sun  who  faileth  never.  To  say, 
therefore,  that "  punctually  on  the  stroke  of  six  "  our  caravan 
moves  out  of  camp  is  an  error,  unless  you  apply  the  phrase 
to  our  slavers,  who  can  only  get  their  bondsmen  off  after 
a  sixth  whack  with  a  stick,  "  punctually  on  the  stroke 
of  six,"  indeed. 

(Sth  September.) 
But  we  have  an  anchor  to  windward  all  the  time. 
Here  are  your  September  and  October  rushing  past,  I 
repeat,  the  punctual  rains  due  at  any  time,  like  an  express. 
And  here,  too,  are  your  hot  Africa  and  hotter  Africans 
trying  hard  to  make  us  a  broken-spirited  jumble  of  dis- 
traction.   But  we  meet  our  Rob  Roy's  hang-dog  look  with 
the  genuine  and  exultant   retort  that  though  indeed 
empty-handed  we  are  not  empty-headed,  and  therefore 
cannot  give  what  we  do  not  possess.    Well,  this  demon- 
strable denial  of  ours  is,  as  I  have  said,  a  real  anchor  to 
windward,  for  the  African  has  a  curiously  hard-headed 
way  of  judging  things  by  practical  proof    But,  mark  you, 
until  in  some  way  you  have  paid  this  man's  demands, 
normal  relations  with  the  tribe  in  food-buying  are  not 
supposed  to  be   established.    You  are  boycotted,  and 
neither  by  charter  nor  barter  can  you  get  anything  from 
them.    First  things  first  is  the  idea  in  this  preliminary 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP" 


119 


tribute  wraugle,  and  the  demand  really  amounts  to  the 
astounding  idea  that  we  must  pay  for  the  very  faggots 
we  break  in  the  forest ;  must  pay  for  the  very  water  we 
drink ;  yea,  finally  and  fearfully,  we  must  pay  for  the 
very  air  we  breathe.  Pay  for  the  very  air  we  breathe, 
and  if  we  don't  "  stand  and  deliver,"  then — why,  soon  we 
will  be  breathing  no  air  at  all.  Ah,  these  road-blocking 
days  are  the  Missionary's  terrible  times,  when  the  feelings 
are  at  flash-point  and  not  at  all  improved  after  a  sleep- 
less nisrht  of  native  drum-dancing.  You  seem  to  awake 
with  the  feeling  that  you  have  not  slept  for  a  hundred 
years,  and  with  a  complexion  like  uncooked  pastry. 
Content  as  these  negroes  are  to  drone  through  life,  they 
glory  in  thus  blocking  the  road  with  their  delusive 
and  abortive  demands. 

Let  me  introduce  you  to  this  fiery  friend  of  ours,  Mr. 
Rob  Roy.  For  a  moment  you  think  the  whole  thing 
must  be  an  optical  illusion.  A  globular  personage,  with 
the  voice  of  Stentor  and  the  build  of  FalstafF,  here  he 
comes  mincing  along  to  the  rhythmic  music  of  tight  new 
I  boots — bought  from  the  slavers.  Personal  remarks  in 
Africa  are  permissible,  and  you  will  perceive  that  Rob  is 
I  dressed  in  his  Sunday  best  for  the  occasion,  to  wit,  an 
utterly  abominable  soldier's  uniform,  probably  now  entering 
its  teens.  Fat  and  fifty,  our  friend  is  obviously  bursting 
for  relief,  for  the  rag-shop  red  coat  is  giving  him  a  claret- 
coloured  face.  With  every  button  straining  at  its 
fastenings,  observe  how  the  tight-unto-choking  collar 
makes  his  ox-neck  overflow  in  waves  of  fat.    After  many 


120 


THINKING  BLACK 


a  strange  vicissitude  of  fortune,  and  originally  fitting 
some  thin,  trig  T.  Atkins  like  a  glove,  this  coloured  coat 
inflicting  slow  tortures  is  seemingly  not  at  all  adapted 
to  our  bandit's  middle-aged  development.  The  head- 
dress is  quite  as  remarkable  too  as  the  nether  garments, 
H.R.H.  as  substitute  for  a  crown  walks  carefully  balancing 
a  caved-in  No.  6  policeman's  helmet  on  a  No.  10  head. 
But,  alas  !  the  head  can  be  empty  that  fills  a  hat.  Look 
now  at  that  tall  and  gawky  youth  strutting  at  his  side 
wearing  a  wild  waistcoat,  a-graduating  in  the  Luban 
school  of  manners.  This,  be  it  known,  is  Rob  Roy  junior, 
playing  local  "Prince  of  Wales"  to  his  father's  role  of 
Rex,  an  "heir-apparent"  he,  more  heir-presumptive  than 
"  heir-apparent,"  for  his  presumption  is  appallingly 
apparent.  Burton  was  right.  Mere  barbarism  rarely 
disgusts  :  it  is  the  unnatural  union  of  civilisation  with 
savagery  that  makes  the  gorge  rise.  The  incongruities 
are  not  grotesque  enough  to  be  amusing  :  they  are  merely 
ugly  and  painful. 

(Later.) 

What,  then,  is  this  negro's  programme  for  the  day  ? 
"  Drink  beer,  think  beer,"  is  the  old  African  saying  that 
describes  it  all.  For  with  tipsy  hilarity  he  promises  you, 
by  the  graves  of  his  ancestors,  that  you  will  be  released 
to-morrow ;  but  his  precious  promises  are  like  proverbial 
pie-crust,  only  made  to  be  broken.  Thus  you  see  our 
Rob  Roy  glorying  in  his  old  game  of  the  blocked  road, 
his  glory  our  shame.  Each  dragging  day  of  delay  he 
celebrates  with  one  of  his  all-night  dances,  the  nude 


PRECCCIOUS  PRINCELING 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP  '  121 

celebrants  roaring  themselves  hoarse  under  the  fig-trees. 
Though  they  dance  in  their  nudity  under  a  fig-tree,  they 
seem  quite  unconscious  of  the  ancient  application  of  fig- 
leaves,  and  certainly  they  have  more  need  of  a  covering 
of  fig-leaves  than  fig-trees.  Enemy  of  daylight  and 
decent  living,  there  goes  the  midnight  noise  of  the  drums 
echoing  to  the  roar  of  the  dancing  Luvale,  and  the  native 
proverb  hits  off  the  dual  emptiness  of  both  drum  and 
drummer :  "  A  drum  only  sounds  because  it  is  empty." 
Nor  is  this  music  mellowed  and  harmonised  by  distance. 
The  native  has  his  drum  so  near  that  it  seems  to  be  stuck 
in  your  drum  of  the  ear — a  pandemonium  of  music.  Be 
vigilant,  for  this  midnight  drumming  is  on  the  same 
principle  (or  lack  thereof)  that  a  band  of  thieves  burgles  a 
London  house  while  one  of  their  "  pals  "  plays  an  Italian 
barrel-organ  at  the  gate  to  draw  off  attention.  Again 
and  again,  these  Luvale  folks  have  unthatched  a  hut 
under  cover  of  the  noise  and  decamped  with  a  truss  of 
calico.  At  Nalingombe  we  lost,  not  merely  a  bale  of 
calico,  but  also  the  next  needy  day  of  delay  "  talking  "  the 
theft  palaver — bale  lost,  day  lost,  temper  lost.  Tried  in  a 
lull  to  barter  some  local  curios,  my  predilection  being  for 
combs  and  bead-work  ;  but  they  edged  away,  glancing  with 
open  animosity,  after  almost  closing  with  my  offer.  Depend 
on  it,  in  Luvale  a  collector  of  curios  seems  to  the  native 
to  be  himself  the  quaintest  curio  in  his  whole  collection. 

{I3th  September.) 
What  is  all  the  delay  about?    The  answer  is  that 
what  we  are  really  doing  is  "buying  the  road."  You 


122 


THINKING  BLACK 


cross  one  Coilantogle  Ford  sort  of  boundary  only  to  find 
that  the  Roderick  Dhu  you  have  just  escaped  has  a  dozen 
cousins  of  the  same  ilk  farther  ahead.  Often  a  coarse 
English  ballad  is  a  truer  snap-shot  of  African  life  than 
more  pretentious  poetry,  and  if  a  coarse  land  needs  coarse 
description  then  here  you  have  Luvalelaud  in  modified 
English  rhyme  : — 

"There's  a  king  on  every  ash-heap, 
There's  princes  not  a  few, 
There's  a  whole  raft-load  of  potentates 
On  the  road  to  Timbuctoo." 

Thus  you  see  the  divinity  that  hedges  every  tiny  chief 
has  to  be  propitiated  with  Ochivanda,  or  tribute,  and  the 
galling  fact  is  that  this  nobody  has  all  your  own  men  in 
the  hollow  of  his  hand.  He  has  marked  you  for  his 
lawful  prey.  Perceiving  you  in  perplexity  means  that  the 
iron  is  now  red-hot,  so  he  strikes  with  a  will  and  like  a 
wild  one.  "  Keep  the  trail  white  for  us  to  return  "  is  the 
catch  phrase  from  your  traitors,  and  at  every  turn  they 
deplore  your  lack  of  deep  respect  for  all  constituted 
authority.  They  nag  you  and  they  jag  you  with  the  re- 
minder that  all  the  chiefs  will  loot  any  further  transport 
following  us  in,  if  we  fail  to  make  the  path  "white"  by 
paying  exceptionally  extortionate  tribute.  Proverb-logic 
again  routed  us,  and  this  time  the  reminder  was  that 
"the  key  that  opens  is  also  the  key  that  locks."  Nor 
was  this  all.  Our  Biheans  rushed  to  more  mad  metaphor 
to  make  us  yield.  "  Look,"  said  they,  "at  this  long  road 
in  from  the  Ocean  :  like  the  human  body,  lo  !  what  is  this 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP" 


123 


road  but  the  gullet?  Out  yonder  on  the  Atlantic  sea- 
shore you  have  the  mouth  open  to  receive  supplies.  Now 
you  white  men  (literally,  "you  big  devils")  are  going 
far  into  the  stomach  of  Africa,  but  linking  mouth  and 
'peptics'  [Chifu)  is  this  long  gullet- way  which  must  not 
be  blocked — block  the  gullet-trail  and  you  will  starve,  for 
the  mouth  is  cut  off  from  the  stomach."  Thus  we  sur- 
rendered at  discretion,  swallowed  the  affronts  in  a 
deplorably  double  sense,  kept  our  mouths  shut,  and  our 
long  line  of  supplies  open.  For  what  again  saith  the 
proverb  ?  "  If,  0  exasperated  one,  you  are  tied  up  in 
ropes,  the  more  you  tug,  the  tighter  the  knots  become." 

N.B. — In  Africa  a  Missionary  is  like  steel,  no  use  if  he 
loses  his  temper.  By  every  trick  and  device,  the  Devil 
tries  to  lure  from  you  your  song,  and  the  only  safe  man  is 
the  Psalmist  sort :  My  heart  is  fixed,  I ^11  sing — i.e.  I  am 
going  in  for  singing  as  a  habit  of  life  in  Africa.  "  The 
happiness  of  duty  "  is  a  blessed  old  belief,  no  doubt,  but 
far,  far  better  in  Africa  to  reverse  the  motto  and  make  it 
run,  "The  duty  of  happiness."  "Chance  sparks  kindle 
chance  tinder,"  runs  the  proverb,  so  beware ! 

{Later. ) 

Mere  "  Bible  and  walking-stick "  campaign  as  ours  is, 
no  wonder  the  natives  call  us  "The  Softies."  But  again 
and  again  it  is  Mr.  Softie  who  gets  them  out  of  a  hole. 
For  example,  let  me  here  record  as  legitimate  history  an 
olive-branch  victory  farther  East  that  opened  the  Luban 
road.  We  are  twisting  along  the  trail,  a  great  band  of 
Mwcru-bound  emigrants  numbering  nearly  three  hundred 


124 


THINKING  BLACK 


souls.    Very  weary  and  very  dreary  that  great  crowd  is ; 
witness  this  worn-out  mother  whose  baby  was  born  to-day 
on  the  long  march.    Born  in  the  woods,  this  biped  baby 
is  treated  like  a  little  antelope  and  must  travel  two  hours 
after  he  has  seen  daylight.    Christened  after  the  forest 
that  cradled  him,  this  title  clings  to  him  all  his  life ; 
imagine  an  English  baby  with  no  cradle  but  a  travelling- 
trunk,  and  travelling  with  the  trunk  as  soon  as  it  is  born. 
We  are  pushing  on  for  a  river  camp  before  nightfall ; 
some  have  snatched  at  a  dry  faggot,  remembering  the 
needed  fire  ahead ;  here  and  there  mushrooms  put  in  an 
appearance  for  the  prospective  supper,  but  we  are  all 
weary  and  pinched.     Duck,  a  welcome  sight  in  the 
morning,  is  the  last  thing  we  want  to  see  now,  for  a  duck 
means  marsh,  and  marsh  means  weary  wading,  wet  socks, 
and  a  shiver-and-sweat  fever.    Afar — oh  the  music  ! — the 
voice  of  our  terminal  river  begins  at  last  to  call,  beckoning 
us  on,  and  at  last  we  come  out  of  the  forest  with  a  shout  of 
relief,  for  there  ahead  is  our  river — green  Jordan,  call  it — 
beyond  which  is  the  negroes'  promised  land  of — of  camp. 
And  soon  we  have  negotiated  the  deep  dark  thing  over 
an  acrobatic  bridge,  and  soon  the  axes  are  out  felling  a 
spacious  bivouac.    An  odd  enough  company,  to  be  sure, 
for  ten  tribes  are  represented,  which  augurs  not  discord 
but  the  contrary.    In  the  old  Mushidi  capital  stranger 
met  and  mated  with  stranger,  the  man  from  the  North 
with  the  woman  from  the  South ;  and  the  family  tie  was 
often  shown  to  be  the  merest  calico  concern,  wearing  out 
with  the  calico  that  bound  it.    Our  camp  every  day  is 


"OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP  "  125 


like  a  good-sized  village,  the  loud  after-supper  hum  from 
the  fires  being  rather  pleasant  though  a  little  bit  noisy. 
The  sweep  of  stockade  is  fully  150  yards  in  circumference, 
in  the  centre  of  which  is  my  big  hut,  where  I  sleep  with 
my  personal  boys.  This  palisade  is  so  built  that  it  forms 
at  the  same  time  the  huts  of  the  people,  each  man  having 
so  many  yards  of  ground  to  stockade  before  he  joins  on 
with  his  neighbour,  who  comes  to  meet  him  half-way. 
Only  one  gateway  is  allowed,  owing  to  the  dangerous 
state  of  the  forest,  and,  with  all  their  instincts  up  in  arms, 
the  men  look  out  jealously  that  no  one  leaves  a  gap.  It 
is  now  broodingly  dark,  and  most  around  the  fires  are 
looking  with  a  hungry,  glassy  stare  at  the  supper-pots, 
when  a  shrill  whistle  startles  all — a  shriek-whistle  known 
too  sadly  well ;  and  then !  And  then,  as  a  matter  of 
plain,  unpleasant  fact,  some  red  toucan  feathers  appear 
over  our  stockade.  Everybody's  jaw  drops,  and,  in  a 
flash,  we  know  that  war  is  in  the  wind,  red  war  that  has 
painted  the  African  map  from  ocean  to  ocean.  Where 
then,  to  be  definite,  are  we  ?  Into  what  trap  have  wc 
fallen?  "Oh  no,"  say  the  emerging  warriors,  "we  have 
nothing  against  you,  but  to-morrow  we  begin."  In  a 
word,  we  have  put  our  foot  in  it,  have  arrived  just  on 
the  eve  of  a  great  inter-tribal  battle,  a  wild  Waterloo. 
The  old  tale  of  the  hereditary  hatred  of  the  clans  and 
the  Highland  Mac's  sending  round  the  fiery  cross — fiery 
feathers  in  this  case.  A  long  quarrel  has  been  in  soak 
for  years ;  boundaries  have  been  dishonoured,  clansmen 
kidnapped,  ivory  tribute  stolen  ;  and  now  at  last  for  the 


126 


THINKING  BLACK 


final  argument  of  kings.  And  is  God  not  going  to  have 
a  say  in  it  all,  the  pitched  "battle  raging  itself  out  ?  And 
will  they  die  like  dogs  without  knowing  that  He  has  an 
argument  with  both  of  them  ? 

Yea,  here  again  (and  blessed  be  our  Rock !)  we  may 
write  on  earth  what  God  has  written  in  heaven  :  Bible 
diplomacy,  olive-branch  pleadings  right  through  the 
night,  and  with  the  day-dawn  came  the  truce  of  God ; 
a  red  sunrise  to  a  "white"  day.  We  were  as  bland  as 
they  were  bitter,  but  we  won.  This  is  how  it  was  done. 
Halving  a  group  of  elders,  the  one  section  went  off  to 
preach  peace  in  Chona's  war-camp,  while  the  other  half 
carried  the  olive  branch  into  the  rival  Mac's.  And 
although  at  first  they  were  greeted  with  a  pelting  storm 
of  refusals,  the  great  armistice  was  at  weary  length  assured. 
Not  a  mere  truce,  not  a  patchwork  peace,  but  a  sterling 
pact  that  has  held  on  through  nearly  twice  ten  years,  and 
ensured  an  open  Western  road.  These,  be  it  known,  are 
the  Luburi  bog  tribesmen,  whom  a  whole  park  of  artillery 
could  not  dislodge  from  their  amphibious  retreat ; 
"  human  otters "  their  title.  So,  even  so,  we  open  the 
way,  under  God ;  a  few  burning  words  of  daysmanship, 
a  longer  pleading  for  soul-escape  as  well  as  body-escape, 
and  lo !  the  rainbow  in  the  cloud.  The  Western  road  ! 
What  pioneer  memories  of  the  olden  time  are  in  the 
name;  of  weary  days  when  wc  bored  our  way  far,  far 
into  the  interior :  yes,  wc  purchased  that  long  weary 
trail,  bought  (witli  kind,  not  cash)  a  passage  with  our 
meagre  belougiugs,  au  old  shirt  here,  an  older  pair  of 


"  OWN  UP  AND  PAY  UP 


127 


trousers  there — and  so  we  moved  on  our  pilgrim  trail, 
nightfall  seeing  us  minus  a  rag  or  two  and  a  day's  march 
nearer  home.  Fools  for  Christ's  sake  Whose  is  the 
princedom  of  peace,  we  tried  to  meet  all  comers  with  a 
Gospel  smile,  listened  to  their  Kob  Roy  intentions,  paid 
their  free-booters'  levy  as  though  it  were  Caesar's  shekel 
of  silver,  and  laid  up  treasure  in  Heaven  according  to 
Matt.  vi.  Even  Rob  Roy,  I  presume,  comes  under  the 
heading  "There  is  no  power  but  of  God."  Nor  does  one 
find  it  difficult  to  wave  a  welcome  olive  branch  in  the 
face  of  long-drowned  tribes  who  are  weary  to  death  of 
war's  deluge.  Peace  has  balm  right  round  the  globe, 
and  you  bless  the  Prince  thereof  that  such  is  your  calling, 
to  bring  men  out  of  the  midnight  into  the  sunshine. 


9 


CHAPTER  VIII 
Dark  Doings  in  Luvaleland 


"To  do  as  all  men  ever  would, 
Own  no  man  master  but  their  mood." 

«  •  * 

"  The  fact  is  that  the  running  of  a  tropical  colony 
is,  of  all  tests,  the  most  searching  as  to  the  develop- 
ment of  the  nation  that  attempts  it ;  to  see  helpless 
people  and  not  to  oppress  them,  to  see  great  wealth 
and  not  to  confiscate  it,  to  have  the  absolute  power 
and  not  to  abuse  it,  to  raise  the  native  instead  of 
sinking  yourself,  these  are  the  supreme  trials  of  a 
nation's  spirit." 

Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle. 
«  «  • 

"In  Africa  the  animalistic,  self-indulgent  white 
man  approximates  yet  nearer  the  animal ;  the 
intellectually  active,  destitute  of  the  stimulus  of 
conversation  and  encounter  with  diverse  opinion 
and  nimble  wits,  becomes  an  intellectual  fungoid." 

Blackburn. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


Dark  Doings  in  Luvaleland 

T  N  which  the  veil  being  only  partially 
withdrawn,  the  black  man  is  seen 
to  have  black  manners. 

{17th  September.) 

ALL  these  days  our  old  friend  Latitude  1 2°  is  running 
East  and  West  on  our  right,  more  like  a  hand-rail 
fencing  us  in  than  an  imaginary  map-line.  So  East, 
endlessly  East  to  the  sun  does  our  road  run,  that  the  way- 
faring man  though  a  fool  shall  not  err  therein.  The  rivers 
are  elusive  and  uncertain,  wriggling  across  our  trail  for  a 
few  minutes  like  a  shining  serpent,  then  darting  off,  lost  in 
the  bush.  Not  so  loyal  Latitude  12°.  Say,  nearly  as  far 
as  Longitude  22°,  it  is  a  faithful  friend  all  the  way  ;  now 
river,  now  jungle,  now  flats — but  come  river,  or  jungle,  or 
flats,  the  12th  parallel  unifies  them  all.  "  Sourcing  it" 
is  their  participle  that  gives  the  geography  of  our  route. 
On  our  far  left  the  baby  Kasai  is  babbling  like  a  brook, 
and  the  1st  of  September  sees  the  far-flowing  Lumese  born 
a  little  after  we  left  Tenda.  One  day  more  and  a  sharp 
turn  East  reveals  the  baby  Lucna,  a  poor  trickle  of  liquid 

Ul 


132 


THINKING  BLACK 


mud  made  up  of  a  few  ponds  linked  together.  Long 
sandy  slopes  all  the  way,  the  green  shoots  of  the  rubber 
root  often  the  only  speck  of  relief  in  the  trail.  Farther 
back  in  Chokwe  country  the  hills  were  huddled  too  close, 
their  V-shaped  hollows  giving  quite  a  jolt.  Only  after  a 
long  series  of  complex  tumbles  did  we  get  out  of  it  with 
meal-bags  that  had  been  empty  for  two  years — days,  I 
mean.  But  the  pitcher  that  goes  often  to  the  water  will 
at  last  surely  be  broken,  and  at  Kasenga  one  of  our  men, 
a  tough  old  roadster,  lay  down  and  died.  Two  days  ago 
he  gave  the  warning  that  this  travelling  blend  of  jolting 
and  hunger  would  kill  him,  the  honest  hazel  eyes  of  the 
fellow  proclaiming  that  his  was  no  shuffling  cowardice. 
So  there  in  the  dead  of  night  we  were  forced  to  dig  up  the 
floor  of  his  hut  and  bury  him  like  a  dog,  lest  the  natives 
got  wind  of  it.  Only  dare  to  die  in  their  country,  only 
dare  to  cover  the  face  of  your  dead  on  "  ashes  to  ashes  " 
principle,  and  at  once  they  pounce  down  on  you  with  the 
old  nagging  lawsuits.  They  don't  bury  their  dead,  oh 
no !  they,  grandees  excepted,  merely  stick  the  corpse  up 
in  the  forest  between  two  trees,  and  they  demand  damages 
for  all  burial. 

Read  this.  Albeit  prompt  payment  is  the  Luvale 
theory  of  lawsuit  assessment,  their  excessive  extortion 
really  frustrates  quick  settlement :  witness  a  man  to-day 
dunned  for  the  debt  of  his  great-great-grandfather.  Yet 
generations  ago  the  first  instalments  were  paid  to  account, 
and  dribbling  down  the  years  it  has  been  pay  !  pay  !  pay  ! 
all  the  time,  "  the  white  chalk"  acquittal  (receipt)  denied. 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  133 

"No  chalk,  no  clearance"  is  their  formula.  Milonga ! 
Milonga !  is  the  cry,  and  off  all  the  young  lads  are  carried 
by  their  uncles  to  go  the  round  of  the  courts  and  learn  the 
tricks  of  legal  blood-sucking.  Like  a  small  pea  in  a  very 
big  pod  you  have  a  mere  boy  trained  in  word-wriggling 
and  munching  mouthfuls  of  legal  terminology.  This  is 
the  reason  why  a  Missionary  can  scarcely  keep  a  bright 
young  scholar  about  him.  The  uncle  is  sure  to  turn  up 
and  drag  him  off,  willy  uilly,  for  this  legal  education.  If 
you  expostulate,  the  retorting  relative  only  expectorates, 
and  away  they  sail  out  through  the  Mission  gate,  the 
uncle  dragging  the  nephew  like  a  big  steam-tug  making 
off  with  a  dainty  sailing  yacht.  No  new  ideas  are  allowed 
to  build  their  nests  in  the  young  Luvale's  brain.  Nature, 
always  fertile  in  analogies,  gives  a  good  example  of  all  this 
in  the  dozens  of  dogs  nosing  among  the  garbage  of  their 
own  filthy  towns.  Even  so,  Mr.  Luvale  rakes  up  the 
mud-heaps  of  memory,  and  at  last  having  found  his  quibble 
as  a  dog  his  bone,  he  straightaway  bows  to  his  victim  with 
awful  politeness  :  Linga !  Veta ! 

Nevertheless,  prompt  payment  is  the  tribal  ideal,  and  it 
is  only  in  the  "  death  damages,"  or  Chipeshi,  they  hit  on  a 
gruesome  expedient  to  make  a  man  pay  up.  A  husband, 
say,  is  bereaved  of  his  wife,  so  he  must  be  mulcted  heavily 
by  the  relatives ;  calico,  goats,  and  oxen  all  going  to 
appease  their  counterfeit  wrath.  Now  is  their  cruel 
chance  for  "cash  down,"  so,  like  Sinbad  the  Sailor,  they 
shut  in  the  man  with  his  conjugal  corpse  and  let  the  days 
drag  past  to  their  extortions.    Meanwhile,  of  course,  rapid, 


134  THINKING  BLACK 

revolting  mortification  is  going  apace,  and  weeks  after  it 
is  all  over,  debts  paid,  "  white  chalk  acquittal,"  he  emerges 
to  the  sunlight.  Semi-starved,  too,  all  the  time,  only 
water  and  gruel  his  allowance.  So  very  sad,  bad,  and 
mad  is  it  all  that  every  tiny  detail  is  clutched  at  to  make 
delay :  "  We  bury  only  bones,"  is  their  phrase  {Natu 
mhila  vifuhwa  Jcaha). 

This  bereaved  husband,  for  instance,  had  a  long  pre- 
liminary wrangle  with  his  kinsman  in  the  mere  notifying 
of  his  wife's  death.    For,  be  it  known,  "to  notify"  means 
that  you  send  a  personable  bit  of  live-stock,  a  goat  but 
preferably  an  ox,  and  only  thus  can  the  news  of  such  an 
unlikely  thing  as  this  death  get  home  to  the  man's  intelli- 
gence.   Sent  a  big  goat  in  the  first  instance,  this  kinsman 
looked  askance  at  the  animal  and  said  that  its  very  small- 
ness  told  him  his  cousin  had  not  much  wrong  with  her — 
dead  she  certainly  could  not  be  with  only  a  goat  to 
announce  it.    People  don't  notify  deaths  per  post-card 
even  in  Luvaleland,  and  to  send  a  huge  ox  is  the  African 
equivalent  to  sending  a  black-edged  mourning  letter.  A 
goat  is  a  mere  post-card.    Here,  then,  is  his  chance  to 
make  vexatious  delays,  the  preliminary  trouble  being  how 
to  get  the  relatives  even  to  believe  there  is  a  death  at  aU. 
A  full  week  has  run  its  course  before  they  even  dream  of 
gathering  for  the  Chipeshi  (wake  ?),  the  initial  fees  of 
notification  being  now  paid.    Then,  one  by  one,  the 
bereaved  kinsmen  trickle  in,  all  armed  to  the  teeth,  all 
vulpine  in  greed,  and  all  resolved  at  besting  each  other  in 
their  demands.    A  mere  cousin  though  he  be,  the  long 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  135 


list  of  items  in  his  funeral  bill  is  stolidly  fought  for  day 
by  day :  "  death  damages,"  the  most  complicated  of  all. 
For — and  note  this — death  to  a  negro  is  indeed  dissolution 
of  life's  pleasures  as  well  as  dissolution  of  a  mere  mortal 
body,  and  all  the  details  of  that  woman's  wedded  life  must 
now  be  paid  for.    Of  course,  she  cooked  his  food,  so  now 
for  paying  the  total  cookery  bill.    She  fetched  firewood, 
milled  the  meal  and  drew  water,  now's  the  time  to  pay  up, 
ay,  pay  for  every  drink  of  water  and  every  faggot  of 
fire.    Mark  you,  pay  up  for  every  item  to  every  kinsman, 
all  at  once  and  once  for  all.    One  item  in  this  incredible 
invoice  naturally  makes  you  laugh,  for  the  thing  itself  is 
about  laughter :  "  To  the  much  laughter  you  enjoyed  for 
years  when  conversing  with  your  late  spouse,  our  legal 
cousin — total  value,  one  goat."    Not  much  to  laugh  at 
now.    And  so  on  and  on,  the  post-mortem  invoice  runs, 
many  a  shameless  (because  nameless)  item  haggled  over 
on  a  money  basis,  £  s.  d.  as  to  its  very  initials  being 
suitably  equivalent  to  Law  Suit  Damages.    Alas !  the 
higher  you  ascend  in  the  social  scale  the  lower  things  sink, 
the  worse  and  wilder  the  extortion.    The  great  Queen  her- 
self, Nyakatoro,  is  the  lewdest  of  the  lot,  and  the  occasion 
of  her  grandchild's  death  was  the  scene  of  a  loathsome 
C/iipeshi.    Weeks  and  weeks  dragged  past,  but  no  burial, 
the  mourners  forced  to  nurse  the  putrefying  corpse  on 
their  knees  on  the  Luvale  "  we  bury  only  bones  "  principle. 
Meanwhile,  the  shameless  Queen  is  conducting  an  inquiry 
into  the  death  of  her  Musukvlu,  a  "  wlio-killcd-cock-robin  " 
sort  of  investigation  this,  in  which  she  unblushingly 


136 


THINKING  BLACK 


reveals  the  names  of  her  many  paramours,  all  of  whom 
must  now  pay  damages  for  the  grandchild's  death. 

Here  is  a  strong  healthy  stream  we  must  tackle. 
And  being  strong,  not  sickly,  how  can  you  expect  it  to 
be  always  confined  to  its  bed  ?  Winding  and  rewinding 
like  a  watch-spring,  we  follow  the  twists  of  our  river 
round  the  great  S,  then  out  we  go  together,  both 
river  and  traveller,  out  on  a  pancake  plain.  More 
marsh  than  plain  this  becomes,  alas  !  for  its  old  orderly 
up-stream  flow  is  now  impossible ;  and  although  no 
doubt,  like  ourselves,  this  river  entered  on  this  plain 
with  the  very  best  intentions,  the  flat  bankless 
marsh  has  now  forced  the  poor  stream  to  break  all  his 
good  up-stream  resolutions — a  floundering  bog,  nothing 
less.  Yea — and  note  this,  gentle  reader — we  too  end 
in  bog,  just  as  sadly  and  badly.  For  you  cannot  canoe 
it,  so  you  resort  to  the  "  double  man  "  of  exploration — 
that  is  to  say,  aloft  is  your  traveller,  pickaback  like  a 
Japanese  acrobat,  on  his  negro  steed,  hands  clutching  at 
the  woolly  pow,  legs  twisted  tightly  round  his  neck. 
Not  that  this  "  double  man  "  is  doubly  a  man — oh  !  no, 
for  the  more  inches  you  go  up  in  the  world  the  lower  you 
descend  both  in  imagination  and  in  reality.  Each  groping 
step  in  the  pitchy,  stinking  mud  sees  you  nervously 
clutching  at  the  negro's  head,  knees  driven  into  the 
neck  and  ever  mindful  of  the  white  knight's  fate  in 
"  Alice's  Adventures,"  to  wit,  a  beautiful  parabolic  curve, 
head  first.    And  then  for  the  sordid  sequel.  Gathering 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  137 

up  what  little  shreds  of  dignity  are  left  to  you,  you 
roll  yourself  up  in  a  blanket,  while  your  shabby  shirt 
tied  to  a  tree  branch  is  dancing  itself  dry  in  the  wind. 
But  the  cold  cuts  like  a  carving-knife,  and  a  blanket  is 
inadequate.  So,  to  finish  the  folly,  you  are  facetiously 
forced  to  keep  the  shirt  company — you  dancing  yourself 
warm,  while  it  dances  itself  dry.  Of  course  your  comfy 
negro,  per  contra,  likes  all  this  splashing,  for  he  never 
wore  boots  and  never  felt  damp  with  the  clammy  cling 
of  wet  stockings. 

[Later.) 

The  extraordinary  insalubrity  of  the  Luvale  flats  is 
appalling.  In  later  days,  it  was  in  these  sweltering 
plains  Cyril  Bird  and  brave  young  Copithorne  poured  out 
their  lives  for  Luvaleland.  Characteristically  and  car- 
dinally men  of  deep  love  for  souls,  they  gave  their  all  to 
a  tribe  that  listened  for  years  to  the  Gospel  with  sharp 
antagonistic  ears.  Once  Bird  left  for  the  Ocean,  osten- 
sibly to  take  a  much-needed  furlough,  but  the  haunting 
need  of  that  vile  Luvaleland  dragged  him  back,  and  the 
end  was  soon  reached.  Life  like  a  spent  steed  panting 
towards  its  goal,  the  Pauline  gleam  in  his  eye  and  praise 
on  his  lips.  Black-water  fever  they  called  his  mortal 
malady,  but  he  died  of  a  broken  heart,  yes,  broken  for  a 
tribe  of  robbers — a  holiday  at  last,  furlough  in  Glory  I 
Weary  and  worn  by  the  vertical  rays,  what  a  whift"  of 
joy  in  the  thought :  "  Heaven's  ahead — hurrah  !  " 

Remember,  there  is  no  deep  valley  but  near  some 
great  hill,  and  that  sowing  in  tears  culminated  in  others 


I 


138 


THINKING  BLACK 


reaping  with  joy.  Days  grow  into  months,  and  months 
into  years,  and  then  a  lady  can  tell  of  a  whole  town  of 
Luvale  ^  turning  to  God  by  Jesus  Christ :  men,  women, 
and  children,  who  at  last  look  beyond  the  Missionary  to  the 
God  Who  sent  him.  Oh  !  ye  binders  of  other  men's 
sheaves,  remember  the  weary  Birds  and  Copithornes  of 
the  African  field.  Let  us  not  therefore  judge  "  another 
man's  servant "  in  this  resolve  of  Cyril  Bird  to  die  in  and 
for  Africa.  Much  can  be  said  pro  and  con,  but  probably 
more  pro  than  con.  Would  you  desert  your  own  infant 
in  a  foreign  land  when  desertion  meant  doom  ? 

Under  English  laws  it  is  a  misdemeanour  punishable 
with  five  years'  penal  servitude  to  abandon  or  expose  an 
infant  or  child  under  two  years  so  as  to  "  endanger  its 
life  or  to  inflict  permanent  injury,  actual  or  probable, 
upon  its  health."  How  much  more  the  crime  committed 
against  the  new-born  African  soul  in  exposing  it  to  the 
vicissitudes  of  a  pastorless  existence  !  Too  well  this  brave 
man  knew  that  mere  "markinsf  time"  is  of  as  little  value 
as  counting  beads  in  worship.  Too  well  he  knew,  that  if 
we  speak  a  dozen  African  languages  with  the  tongues  of 
men  and  angels  and  have  not  love,  then  Africa  only 
claims  in  us  one  more  of  the  mob  of  sounding  brass  and 
clanging  cymbals.  Ay,  even  if  we  give  our  bodies  to  be 
burned  with  African  fever  and  have  not  love,  we  are 
nothing.      Nevertheless,   it   is  just   here  the  Roman 

1  Following  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Bird  came  Mr.  Schimller,  T)r.  Fiahor,  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  O'Jon,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Cunningham,  and  many  oilier  noble  men  and 
women.    Kazombo  was  the  first  branch  station,  then  Kahinda,  then  Kalene. 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  139 


Catholics,  farther  East,  make  the  cosy  Protestants  blush, 
for  while  we  are  famous  "furlough  "  folks,  they  burn  their 
bridges  and  stick  to  their  posts.  Both  nuns  and  priests 
dedicate  their  lives  to  the  land,  never  hoping  to  sight 
Europe  again,  while  we  parade  England  with  lantern 
lectures  !  These  Romans  laugh  at  us  for  so  deserting  our 
posts,  and  say  that  we  are  like  a  soldier  who  runs  out  of 
action  to  go  and  try  his  skill  at  a  shooting-range.  The 
real  battle  and  real  bullets  are  in  here,  in  the  bush,  while 
away  yonder  on  a  far  English  platform  is  the  amateur 
shooting-range.  "I  felt  like  a  jfireless  chimney  in 
summer,"  was  the  testimony  of  an  old  "  deputation " 
Missionary  in  England. 

(19 th  September.) 
Unless,  however,  this  record  is  to  remain  hopelessly 
tangled,  we  must  mention  sundry  Luvale  traits  that  block 
our  road.  Like  chief,  like  people.  Copying  the  Wagogo 
on  the  Zanzibar  road,  here  you  have  a  whole  tribe 
spreading  its  nets  and  lurking  by  the  roadside  for  loot. 
Legal  loot,  though,  this  claims  to  be  ;  for  when  the  word  is 
passed  along  the  path  that  a  caravan  is  advancing,  there 
is  a  tribal  flutter,  and  this  news  draws  them  like  a  magnet. 
Sea-lawyers  every  soul  of  them,  they  flood  your  camp  and 
pack  in  so  tightly  that  the  perfumed  crowd  exhales  the 
noxious  smell  of  a  bad  drain.  Dr.  Johnson's  remark 
about  Scotland  is  really  applicable  to  odorous  Luvaleland. 
For  when  they  informed  him,  travelling  by  night,  that 
ho.  had  entered  Scotia,  he  retorted,  "  Yes,  I  could  smell 
it  in  the  dark  !  "  (Fie  !  Dr.  Johnson).    Having  the  blood 


140 


THINKING  BLACK 


of  good  old  Scotland  in  my  veins,  it  costs  me  quite  a 
patriotic  pang  to  repeat  this  anti-Scotland  slander,  but 
the  words,  false  then,  are  true  now  when  applied  to  the 
Luvale — you  literally  smell  your  arrival.  You  smile, 
too,  at  the  crowd  of  women  perfecting  the  work  of  nature 
with  dress  and  face  smeared  with  red  dye.  Yet,  after  all, 
what  is  the  difference  between  these  and  an  English  lady, 
who  daubs  two  big  spots  of  rouge  on  her  cheeks  ?  How 
true  it  is  that  the  vices  we  laugh  at  in  others,  laugh  at  us 
in  ourselves.  Ponder  the  whirlif^isr  of  time.  In  the 
Apostle  Paul's  day  at  Rome,  was  not  this  the  very  taunt 
to  restrain  Roman  ladies  from  dyeing  their  hair  and 
painting  their  faces,  to  wit,  that  they  would  become  as 
ugly  as  "  the  woad-stained  Britons  "  ?  Yes,  we  were  the 
"  niggers "  of  those  days.  Did  not  Propertius  try  to 
frighten  Cynthia  out  of  cosmetics  by  likening  her  to  "  the 
coarse  blue-eyed  Britons"?  And  did  not  Cicero  write 
to  his  pal  long  ago  :  "  Atticus !  .  .  .  the  stupidest  and 
ugliest  slaves  come  from  Britain  "  ? 

In  a  second,  with  commendable  promptitude,  the  busi- 
ness begins,  jabber,  babble, twaddle,  cackle! — all  baiting  you 
like  a  bear.  Then  they  break  into  a  whirl  of  questions, 
who  ?  why?  when?  where?  whither? — and  although  once  or 
twice  you  make  a  wild  dive  for  a  probable  answer,  it  ends 
in  your  wearily  resigning  all  pretensions  to  deal  with  them. 
These  Luvale  ladies  have  a  limited  dress  allowance  : 
fancy  one  of  these  sable  sisters  of  mine  wearing  a  la  mode 
a  mere  four-inch  ribbon  of  calico.  Pointing  her  black-kid- 
glovc  finger  right  in  my  eye,  she  called  me  "  Softie."  It 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  141 

is  Chindele!  this,  Chindele!  that;  and  so  they  prattle  on, 
all  of  them  talking  the  proverbial  nineteen  to  the  dozen, 
yet  peevish  and  perverse  withal,  and — depend  upon  it — 
just  waiting  for  an  opening.  Yet  something  must  be 
done,  so  throwing  etiquette  to  the  winds,  after  enduring 
it  all  with  exemplary  meekness,  you  gesture  them  off. 
But  (wolf!)  dare  even  push  one,  dare  even  flick  one 
across  the  face  with  a  handkerchief,  and  the  looting  law- 
suit begins.  We  are  caught  as  neat  as  a  rat  in  a  drain, 
everything  now  ripe  for  a  row.  Fishing  is  the  best  simile 
for  this  thing,  however,  and  one  of  our  Biheans  is  the  first 
foolish  fish  to  rise  to  the  Luvale  fly,  the  possible  lawsuits 
now  being  legion. 

(Later.) 

Be  sure  of  it,  from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Indian  Ocean, 
these  lawsuits  in  Africa  are  legion,  the  be-all  and  end-all 
of  their  lazy  lives.  From  prince  to  beggar  they  have 
resolved  to  trade  on  the  local  sanctions  and  punishments 
of  society.  Take  this  big  black,  shedding  not  the  tears 
of  penitence  but  revolt ;  he  blundered  into  litigation  by 
running  into  a  hut  for  shelter  from  the  rain,  and  the 
housewife  has  the  law  on  him.  Plea :  "  You  came 
dripping  wet  into  my  domicile,  and  these  thy  raindrops 
betoken  much  weeping  in  my  house."  Verdict,  the  wet 
man  must  pay  for  his  ominous  action.  Next  comes  a 
pettifogging  action  because  a  man  called  his  fellow  by  the 
wrong  name  :  "  How  dare  you  call  me  Mr.  Tree  when  I 
am  Mr.  Baggage?  If  you  name  me  Tree,  then  you 
thereby  saddle  me  with  all  that  individual's  legal  responsi- 


142 


THINKING  BLACK 


I 


bility."  Verdict  for  the  platintiflF,  because  law  is  not  logic 
and  logic  is  not  law.  But  worse  than  all  this  comes  a 
long  string  of  cases,  each  plea  amounting  to  the  effrontery 
that  it  is  wrong  to  affirm  the  right,  the  accused's  error 
being  that  he  made  no  error.  A  man  named  "River" 
has  blood  on  his  arm  and  a  passer-by  draws  his  attention 
to  this  fact,  and  in  he  goes  among  the  meshes  of  the  legal 
drag-net.  Penalty :  Mr.  River  must  be  paid  for  the 
accused's  error  in  not  committing  an  error.  Another 
negro  of  the  same  ilk  finds  a  legal  grievance  in  the  fact 
that  truth  has  too  much  sting  in  it.  Crossing  the  river 
with  a  fellow-traveller,  a  leech  clings  to  his  leg,  and  the 
lawsuit  arises  out  of  this  friendly  and  kindly  reminder 
that  the  leech  was  clinoing;  to  him.  Leech  indeed  !  the 
real  blood-sucker  is  this  litigious  black  who  cries,  Give ! 
Give !  Of  the  same  sort  is  this  third  man  ;  "  Scar " 
(Mukofu)  his  name  and  scar  the  subject  of  his  legal  action. 
He  is  an  old  warrior,  has  a  healed  gash  on  his  body,  but 
instead  of  being  proud  of  it  as  a  kind  of  Marengo  medal 
on  which  Napoleon  wrote  the  lone  words,  "  I  was  there," 
— instead  of  this,  he  runs  a  man  into  "  the  judgment 
circle  "  because  he  congratulated  him  on  his  cured  wound. 
"  Why  mention  the  scar  at  all  ? "  snapped  the  warrior ;  '*  'tis 
mine,  not  yours."  Don't  ask  the  why  of  some  of  these 
lawsuits ;  could  mortal  man  tell  ?  Here  is  an  individual 
who  invited  another  to  eat  porridge  that  has  lain  over- 
night— why  make  a  lawsuit  out  of  that  ?  Here  is  another 
passing  a  few  graves  in  the  grass,  and  he  goes  over  the 
names  of  the  various  occupants  of  the  little  graveyard — 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  143 


why  a  lawsuit  for  that  ?  Or  this  man  who  out  of  sheer 
kindness  warned  his  neighbour  of  impending  danger — 
why  have  the  law  on  him  for  that?  Can  you  wonder 
that  the  black  man  will  not  believe  the  Gospel  of  Grace 
because  it  is  all  too  incredibly  good  to  be  true  ?  What 
does  he  know  about  Grace  ?  Here,  too,  you  learn  the 
reason  why  your  emancipated  African  under  modern 
European  laws  is  such  an  inglorious  disappointment.  For 
the  transition  is  all  too  abrupt,  and  the  same  African  who 
formerly  had  tribal  manners  rammed  down  his  throat  by 
legal  code,  now  thinks  he  can  lapse  into  grossi^rete  and 
indifference  to  details.  Take,  for  instance,  that  stern  old 
law  of  theirs  against  random  spitting :  was  he  not 
penalised  for  this  ?  Alas  !  the  new  white  rt^gime  has  no 
such  penalty,  and  one  negro  cook  I  knew,  having  run  out 
of  wash-up-water  for  his  dishes,  calmly  sent  in  to  his 
master  two  courses,  all  the  plates  of  which  had  been 
washed  (dare  I  write  it  ? )  with  his  own  African  saliva. 
*  *  * 

As  in  Bihe,  so,  too,  farther  East,  all  the  hamlets  we 
peer  into  are  of  the  same  pig-sty  sort.  Imagine  a  land 
of  huts  from  ocean  to  ocean  ;  a  land  in  which  not  one 
noble  castle  ever  lifted  its  grey  towers  above  the  ancient 
forest ;  a  land  of  holes  and  hovels,  the  huts  built  in  a  few 
days  and  lasting  about  as  long.  How  true  it  is  that  the 
African  leads  off  by  debasing  his  surroundings,  and  then 
his  surroundings  take  revenge  by  debasing  the  African. 
When  you  stumble  across  one  of  these  in  the  woods,  and 
send  an  inquisitive  glance  round  inside,  it  is  only  to  see 


144 


THINKING  BLACK 


what  a  long  start  the  Devil  has  of  the  Missionary.  The 
sin  is  all  sinned  in  the  noonday  glare,  the  kind  of  thing 
spoken  of  by  the  prophet  as  "  sin  drawn  with  a  cart-rope." 
The  same  old  source  of  troubles,  too,  is  this  tight  packing 
together  in  a  filthy  town.  For  the  greatest  enemy  is 
internal :  first  the  enemy  of  his  own  heart,  then  the  enemy 
of  his  own  household,  anon  the  enemy  of  the  next  hut, 
until,  finally,  the  enemy  of  the  next  tribe  reads  them  the 
old  lesson  that  a  house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand. 
Born  in  their  chains,  they  live  in  them  and  die  hugging 
them  as  they  rush  over  the  precipice  into  the  abyss. 
These  chains  are  physical,  and  spiritual,  and  hereditary. 
In  an  African  village  you  can  lie  awake  all  night 
pondering  pitifully  the  needs  of  the  land,  and  during  that 
long  vigil  hear  the  snufiles  and  hoarse  cries  of  a  dozen 
little  babies.  Poor  youngsters  whose  skin  hangs  loosely 
on  them  like  an  ill-fitting  garment,  cursed  with  the 
syphilitic  curse. 

"  An  infant  crying  in  the  night : 
An  infant  crying  for  the  light : 
And  with  no  language  but  a  cry." 

These  are  the  poor  little  bairns  who,  as  Bishop  South 
sadly  said,  "  are  not  born  into  the  world,  but  damned 
into  it."  To  illustrate :  Take  this  life-history  of  one 
such  moaning  and  whimpering  cherub.  Mother  loves 
her  bairn,  but  she  must  be  off  to  the  woods  for  firewood, 
and  baby  cannot  go.  What's  to  be  done  ?  The  dilemma 
is  solved  by  a  neighbour  woman,  one  of  the  black  barren 
type,  who  plots  with  deadly  intent  against  the  life  of 


DARK  DOINGS  IN  LUVALELAND  145 


her  neighbour's  child.  Here,  then,  comes  the  hell-born 
thought.  Now  is  her  chance.  So,  dissolving  in  philan- 
thropic smiles,  she  hypocritically  offers  to  nurse  baby  in 
the  mother's  absence — consequence  :  murder.  The  human 
fiend  rubs  into  the  gums  of  baby  the  virus  of  a  loathsome 
and  nameless  disease,  and  the  cherub  dies  a  horrible  death. 
Even  the  local  black  poet  is  horrified  at  a  thing  of  this 
sort,  and  composes  a  Luban  dirge  which  I  translate  : — 

"  What  is  a  baby's  dying  groan 
To  the  barren  who  have  none  of  their  own  1 " 

Decidedly,  we  are  in  Luvalelaud.  The  young  boys 
about  here  are  called  the  men,  and  the  elders  are  called 
the  "old  boys,"  and  no  wonder.  For  these  youngsters 
begin  to  live  at  full  gallop  when  they  are  more  babies 
than  boys,  and  thus  early  sowing  the  wind  they  reap  a 
roaring  whirlwind :  at  twenty  years  of  age  they  are 
weak  and  can  scarcely  trot,  much  less  gallop,  without 
the  spur  of  stimulants.  Borrowed  beer,  and  preferably 
borrowed  than  bought.  Sneaked  tobacco,  and  the  more 
he  sneaks  the  pleasanter  the  smoke.  Hemp  paid  for, 
ay,  paid  with  the  uttermost  farthing,  for  this  last  lashes 
him  with  passion.  And  so  the  three  wicks  of  the  lamp 
of  life  soon  burn  out  in  blazes,  the  brain,  the  blood,  and 
the  breath.  "  Soon  ripe,  soon  rotten,"  is  the  proverb 
that  tells  the  whole  story,  for  if  he  must  be  a  man  at 
fourteen  then  he  is  sure  of  being  a  boy  at  thirty.  An 
African  lad  knows  everything  too  early,  and  therefore 
can  learn  nothing  when  it  is  too  late. 


CHAPTER  IX 
The  Desert  Journey 


"God  hath  His  deserts  broad  and  brown, 
A  solitude — a  sea  of  sand — 
On  which  He  lets  Heaven's  curtain  down, 
Unknit  by  His  Almighty  Hand." 

*  *  * 

"Then  Israel  sang  this  song  : 
Spring  up,  O  well ;  sing  ye  unto  it  " 

Numbers  xxi.  i 

«  »  * 

"Long  the  blessed  Guide  has  led  me 

By  the  desert  road  ; 
Now  I  see  the  golden  towers — 

City  of  my  God. 
There  amidst  the  love  and  glory 

He  is  waiting  yet; 
On  His  hands  a  name  is  graven 

He  can  ne'er  forget." 


CHAPTER  IX 


The  Desert  Journey 

HEREIN  the  reader  crosses  the 
desert,  and  finds  Zebuluns  por- 
tion awaiting  him,  yea,  he  "  sucks  of 
treasures  hid  in  the  sand'' 

[Later.) 

BUT  in  this  impudent  lawlessness  is  there  no  law-giver  ? 
Not  now,  but  (here  let  me  anticipate)  a  little  later 
the  Portuguese  pushed  in  a  line  of  forts  as  far  as 
Nakandundu,  this  last  link  in  their  chain  of  Commandanis 
being  a  terribly  typical  affair.  "  Africa  begins  at  the 
Pyrenees,"  said  Napoleon  long  ago,  and  here  is  a  Portu- 
guese who  proves  that  Portugal  is  as  bad  as  Africa.  A 
prince  of  brigands,  this  official  is  a  noonday  slaver : 
instance,  his  sending  out  12  kilos  of  powder  to  buy  a  lx)y. 
No  boy  marketable  for  the  moment ;  so  in  lieu  of  the 
masculine  gender  they  drag  in  a  young  woman  and  baby  as 
equitable  equivalent.  But  this  petulant  Portuguese  must 
have  his  boy  ;  so  a  black  soldier,  knowing  his  masterful 
man,  offers  to  barter  a  boy  for  the  baby  and  mother — done  I 
You,  of  course,  call  this  spoiling  the  country,  and  Senhor 

140 


150 


THINKING  BLACK 


Commandant  heartily  agrees  with  the  idea ;  spoiling  is 
the  very  word,  only  he  makes  this  poor  participle  do 
double  duty — he  spoils  the  country  by  extorting  the 
spoils.  Across  the  way,  the  Mission  is  a  wakeful  witness 
of  it  all,  but  this  Chefe  scorns  intervention,  pouring  out 
fluent  anathemas  against  the  English.  Prejudice,  re- 
member, is  only  another  way  of  spelling  "  prejudge,"  and 
the  blood  flames  in  such  an  ofiicial's  face  like  a  danger 
signal  whenever  the  Missionary  expostulates.  But  there 
is  impending  change.  Soon  this  political  Apothecary 
discovers  a  fly  in  his  ointment,  the  British  and  Belgians 
advancing  simultaneously.  Up  from  the  South-West 
come  the  former ;  West  from  the  Garenganze  come  the 
latter,  both  bent  on  combating  this  Portuguese  slavery, 
both  encroaching  up  near  this  Commandant's  door. 
Time  was  when  all  around  was  no  man's  land,  unlimited 
territory  meaning  unlimited  despotism.  Now  comes  the 
check.  A  hunted-down  Luvale  man  runs  across  the 
border  seeking  sanctuary  on  British  soil ;  how  can  the 
Portuguese  chief  get  at  him  ?  Very  simply.  Salimi  is 
"wanted,"  but  he  is  snug  under  the  shelter  of  the  Jack 
in  N.W.  Rhodesia.  But  —  mark  this  conjunction  — 
Samusole  is  his  brother-in-lnw,  and  he  is  on  Portuguese 
soil ;  so  his  village  is  surrounded  by  night  and  S.  dragged 
off"  to  the  Fort.  Beaten  every  day  by  chicotte,  he 
pays  up  some  slaves,  yet  still  they  dun  and  whack  him — 
all  by  proxy,  all  for  that  mysterious  other  man  who  is 
enjoying  English  protection  across  the  border. 

This  Salimi,  I  have  said,  is  "  wanted,"  but  for  what 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY  151 


and  whose  crime  ?  He  has  a  hamlet  annoyingly  across 
the  frontier,  you  remember,  and  to  this  man's  place  came 
three  roaming  Portuguese  slavers  one  day.  Out  of  the 
grass  spring  three  Britishers,  and  the  three  slavers  are 
imprisoned.  Then  the  clannish  Portuguese  over  the  way 
gnash  their  teeth,  and  now  it's  "  Salimi  this  "  and  "  Salimi 
that,"  until  in  sheer  exasperation  they  pounce  on  the  man 
who  dared  to  marry  such  a  being's  sister.  The  old  ghost 
of  Nkole,  you  see.  No  wonder  the  natives  are  bad. 
Yet  as  a  matter  of  fine  fact  the  best  defence  of  this 
oppressor  is  made  by  these  very  negroes  who  are  wronged. 
As  a  triumph  of  terseness  they  read  off  another  "  thinking 
black  "  lesson  from  their  old  Book  of  Nature,  and  find  that 
a  dozen  trees  all  growing  in  a  clump  together  dart  up  like 
needles  to  the  sky.  Whereas,  jyer  contra,  one  solitary  tree 
has  the  tedious  tendency  to  be  crooked.  The  letter  S — 
that's  the  twisty  shape  isolation  makes  many  a  lonely 
white  man.  Six  or  sixteen  of  the  letter  111111  in  a  cluster 
— lo  !  the  crowding  together  of  civilisation  straightens  out 
all  their  S-shaped  crooks  and  cranks.  This,  then,  is  their 
defence  of  the  white  man  cut  off  from  all  his  race,  and  the 
Bantu  song  runs  : — 

"  Oh  !  crookoil  lonely  forest  tree, 
Yes,  crooked  because  lonely, 
How  very  different  things  would  be 
If  only  comrades  two  or  three 
Could  break  your  lone  monotony." 

One  could  probably  travel  far  across  the  fields  of 
literature  and  fail  to  find  a  better  metaphor  for  the 


152 


THINKING  BLACK 


benefits  of  mutual  help  derived  from  dwelling  in  a  com- 
munity— ten  trees  in  a  clump  shooting  up  like  needles, 
and  one  lone  tree  twisted.  Moral :  Don't  be  a  hermit,  or 
you  will  be  crooked  and  cranky. 

(Is^  Octoher.) 

And  so,  as  the  thirty  days  in  September  pass,  one  is 
endlessly  reminded  by  this  negro  babble  that  Africa  and 
the  African  are  merely  convertible  terms.  Each  is 
mutually  and  monotonously  explanatory  of  the  other. 
Here  on  the  march,  for  instance,  you  are  daily  rubbing 
shoulders  with  a  negro  whose  naked  speech  is  first 
cousin  to  his  naked  body:  nude  negro  =  nude  speech. 
Even  in  English,  why  forget  that  custom  and  costume 
are  the  same  word  ?  Therefore  in  Africa  the  funny 
formula  runs,  nude  costume  =  nude  custom,  and  naked 
negro  means  naked  speech.  Call  it  objectionable  this,  by 
all  means,  but  call  it  also  consistent  on  the  negro's  part. 
For  precisely  as  Mr.  African's  soul  is  clothed  in  its  only 
black  suit  of  bare  skin,  so  too  that  same  soul  clothes  itself 
in  equally  nude  speech. 

Another  key  to  "thinking  black."  Take  this  great 
African  sun  as  a  formative  factor  in  our  negro's  character. 
Here  you  have  the  pulse  of  the  whole  black  race.  There 
in  that  fructifying,  sterilising  sun  their  hard  history  is 
epitomised,  for  in  this  hopelessly  dry  season  so  sharply 
contrasted  with  the  luxuriant  wet,  you  find  the  source  of 
spasm  in  the  negro's  very  bones.  This  time  the  formula 
runs,  "  Like  seasons,  like  African  " ;  and  just  as  Africa 
goes  to  sleep  for  half  of  the  year,  the  very  tree-sap  dying 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY  153 


down  into  the  tap-root,  so,  even  so,  with  our  dozing  negro. 
He  copies  his  own  Africa  and  is  as  lazy  as  a  log,  hibernat- 
ing like  a  hedgehog.  The  reason,  this,  why  there  are  so 
few  moody  Africans  and  why  per  million  they  are  of  one 
humdrum  type.  Just  as  from  king  to  beggar  they  are 
all  N.,  S.,  E.,  and  W.  dining  on  one  absolutely  uniform 
porridge  and  beans,  even  so  for  thousands  of  miles  they 
have  all  the  same  sort  of  sun-baked  weather,  same  yellow 
outlook,  same  six-months-on-end  blue  sky.  No  use  here 
for  that  prop  of  introductory  conversation  in  England — 
the  weather.  Contrast  the  moody  Englishman  for  whom 
Nature  creates  a  new  mood  with  the  changing  weather  of 
each  new  day,  John  Bull  groping  through  the  mistof  Monday 
to  greet  Tuesday's  sunshine,  and  anon  waking  to  the  rattle 
of  Wednesday's  rain.  Weather  is  a  notorious  formative 
of  character  in  man's  moods,  the  spirits  rise  and  fall  with 
the  mercury,  a  varying  barometer  making  a  varying  type 
of  individual. 

Not  so,  however,  when  the  first  loud  crack  of  thunder 
heralds  the  farmer's  rains ;  that  very  sound  seems  to 
startle  him  from  his  winter  sleep.  His  two  seasons  make 
the  African  into  two  distinct  men  with  two  distinct 
manners,  for  here  comes  their  great  annual  miracle  of  the 
blossoming  of  Aaron's  rod.  Nature's  hurried  growth 
is  now  a  type  of  his  own  spasmodic  haste,  and  he  has 
caught  the  infectious  quiver  in  the  air.  Some,  indeed, 
do  snatch  at  the  closing  weeks  of  the  dry  season  to  travel, 
for  this  is  their  only  chance  to  see  the  face  of  their  own 
continent  after  the  grass  fires  have  swept  the  vast  land 


154 


THINKING  BLACK 


bare.  But  the  first  roar  of  the  advancing  rain  acts  as  an 
alarm-bell  to  call  in  all  stragglers  who  have  wandered  off 
for  a  journey,  and  now  you  can  behold  a  model  negro, 
hedgehog  sloth  all  gone,  stooping  to  his  hoe  in  the 
morning  mists.  That  bobbing  back  of  his  might  be  made 
of  cast-iron  with  a  hinge  in  it,  so  pluckily,  so  ploddingly 
does  he  bend  to  this  farming  business.  The  rising  tree- 
sap  seems  in  some  sense  to  be  a  picture  of  what  is  happen- 
ing in  the  black  man.  Ah  !  if  he  would  only  treat  his 
soul  as  he  treats  his  fields,  all  would  be  well. 

[Later.) 

Ten  years  ago  I  passed  along  the  edge  of  a  field,  and 
there  was  the  owner  toiling  at  the  hard  soil,  a  drought 
having  baked  the  red  earth  like  a  brick.  "  From  the 
passing  a  passing  word  "  is  the  local  proverb,  so  I  comply 
with  tribal  courtesy,  bawling  across  the  corn-field  a 
regret  that  the  soil  is  onerous  and  intractable.  But  the 
churlish  clay  has  made  a  churlish  cultivator.  Back  from 
my  gruff"  friend  comes  the  gruffer  blasphemy  :  "  Yes  !  a 
hard  God  has  hardened  the  soil  by  denying  rain." 

Ten  years  pass,  years  that  see  this  graceless  man  with 
many  a  graceless  anti-God  growl,  a  hard  heart  blaming 
a  hard  God.  And  now  comes  another  instance  of  "  the 
dramatic  neatness  of  God's  methods  " — ten  years  have 
passed,  I  say,  and  here  is  the  same  man  in  the  same  field 
and  the  same  passer-by.  The  rich  red  loam  is  no  longer 
refractory,  two  successive  days  of  rain  have  soaked  the 
soil  soft,  the  old  growler's  face  wreathed  in  smiles.  "  From 
the  passing  man  a  passing  word,"  and  once  again  I 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY  155 


smile  across  a  remark  about  the  child's-play  hoeing  under 
such  simple  conditions.  Saved  and  knows  it,  what  does 
he  now  answer — this  same  man  in  this  same  field  to  this 
same  passer-by?  "Truly  soft,"  says  he,  "is  the  soil,  for 
the  God  Who  softened  my  heart  also  softened  the  hard  soil : 
He  has  rained  on  my  hard  soul  as  well  as  on  my  soil." 
Do  not  blame  that  simple  soul  l)ecause  he  did  not  see 
the  coincidence,  for  he  did  not.  No  calendar  has  he,  no 
notion  that  here — or  nowhere — is  divine  drama.  Ten 
solid  years  ago,  the  same  field,  same  man,  same  passer- 
by :  a  hard  heart  and  hard  soil  then  ;  a  soft,  saved 
heart  and  soft,  saved  soil  now.  The  old  graceless  growl  is 
gone,  and  now  for  the  note  of  joy — a  full  octave,  a  grand 
diapason.  Having  both  a  canoe  and  a  farm,  this  saved 
soul  is  as  much  sailor  as  landsman,  and  can  literally  fulfil 
Clement's  word  in  the  second  century  :  "  Praising  we 
plough  ;  and  singing  we  sail." 

{20th  October.) 
A  formidable  feature  of  our  inland  journey  is  the 
crossing  of  the  weary  Kifumadzi  desert  in  the  Luvale 
country.  A  curious  bit  of  the  earth's  crust  this  to  crawl 
over.  In  old  maps  here  is  a  flat  seriously  put  down  as  a 
sea,  and  (certes!)  looking  out  from  camp  just  as  day  is 
breaking  in  red  on  the  great  expanse  of  waste  lying  at 
our  feet,  the  outlook  is  reminiscent  of  a  sullen  sea.  We, 
as  it  were,  camped  on  the  beach  near  by,  while  stretching 
far  beyond  lies  the  great  sandy  ocean  shorn  by  the  wind 
of  anything  that  ever  grew  upon  it.  Tufts  of  sere  grass 
the  exception.    You  might  carry  the  idea  a  little  further, 


156  THINKING  BLACK 

and  like  ships  away  on  tKe  skyline,  suspicion  the  faint 
outline  of  one  or  two  palm-like  trees,  mere  pin-points  in 
the  immensity.  Into  this  desolation  we  plunge  to-day, 
our  black  guides  warning  us  that  we  will  be  cheaply 
out  of  it  with  four  days'  hard  journeying,  water  the  cruel 
lack  ahead.  We  are  in  for  Zebulan's  portion  at  last : 
"  They  shall  suck  of  treasures  hid  in  the  sand."  Thus 
spurred  on,  we  cut  off  our  first  slice  of  desert  in  a  five 
hours'  journey,  lurching  along  over  tiresome  sand,  the 
joys  of  a  flat-as-a-dining-table  path  quite  lost  in  the 
dragging,  deterrent  track.  Towards  the  close  of  the  journey 
wells  dug  by  former  travellers  begin  to  appear,  and  down 
into  these  we  anxiously  peer  for  a  sign  of  water.  In  vain. 
Once  and  again,  and  yet  again,  we  draw  blank,  all  as  dry 
as  a  kiln.  Not  enough  water  to  wash  your  teeth  in,  not 
a  drop.  N.B.  :  Dig  your  well  before  you  are  thirsty. 
Yet  still  we  swelter  on,  more  than  a  little  hungry,  more 
than  a  little  hot,  more  than  a  little  dirty,  seeking,  ever 
seeking  the  water  we  find  not.  Miles  and  miles  of  un- 
mitigated desert — voila  tout. 

At  last  our  joyless,  jaded  men  will  no  longer  be 
beguiled  on  by  hopes  of  hypothetical  water,  so  they  de- 
clare they  will  dig.  This  they  do,  right  nobly,  under  a 
broiling  sun,  and  although  a  solid  hour  of  it  sees  no 
result,  still  they  dig  on  into  the  second  hour  with  plucky 
negro  pugnacity  and  breathing  as  loud  as  a  forge  bellows. 
That  perspiration  streaming  from  them  in  the  sun,  they 
call  "  the  salt  melting  out  of  the  beef"  All  our  superior 
sagacity  is  scorned,  the  Bihean  being  quite  sure  that  if 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY  157 


water  appears  at  all  it  will  be  in  spite  of  us.  Finally  he 
won't  even  answer  our  eager  questions,  but  keeps  a  surly 
silence,  thinking,  no  doubt,  that  the  sound  of  our  own 
nonsense  will  make  us  ashamed.  Approaching  one  of 
these  diggers,  tongue  hanging  out  of  the  head,  I  was 
alarmed  to  see  the  faddy  old  gentleman  look  up  with 
terror — or  a  good  imitation  of  it — and  beseeching  me 
with  the  sweat  of  honest  toil  on  his  brow  to  make  myself 
scarce,  or  the  boots  would  drive  away  the  water. 
"Boots,"  quoth  he,  "are  not  for  desert  sands."  But  the 
darkest  hour  is  before  the  dawn,  and  the  great  frosty 
chill  in  our  soul  is  dissipated  by  a  sharp  pistol  shot, 
"  Water  ! "  his  eloquent,  unassisted  noun  scorning  the  aid 
of  verb,  adjective,  or  adverb. 

Then  a  man's  head  peeps  up  above  the  top  of  the 
well,  and  again  and  again  the  old  Greek  "  Eureka  ! "  rings 
out  defiance  to  the  desert.  Anon  comes  a  song  centuries 
old,  and  sung  in  all  Eastern  lands,  one  song,  many 
variants  : — 

"  Spring  up,  O  well !  " 

At  first  the  stuff  drunk  is  liquid  mud,  first  cousin  to 
dirtiest  ditch-water  of  old  England,  but  early  visitors  to 
the  well  find  the  sediment  eliminated  and  a  fairly  clean 
drink  the  residuum.  Besides,  there  is  a  real  rift  in  this 
cloud,  and  barring  colour  and  consistency  this  precious 
fluid  is  neither  brackish  nor  bitter — why,  sand  is  the  finest 
filter  going.  Far  better  this  than  the  many  putrid 
African  pools  one  must  sample,  l)rimful  with  tadpoles 
and  insects  as  nameless  as  numberless. 


158 


THINKING  BLACK 


But,  as  the  natives  put  it,  "  there  can  be  no  birth 
without  a  pang,"  so  the  dawn  of  the  21st  of  October  sees 
us  stoically  beginning  a  second  day  of  the  desert  tramp, 
the  absolute  sameness  of  the  chronicle  being  repeated 
with  the  certainty  of  a  phonograph.  The  silent  desert 
parching  in  the  sun  can  now  be  seen  to  break  away  in 
weary  waves  of  sandhills,  and  our  caravan  pace  has  de- 
generated into  a  crawl,  the  route  really  not  as  "  the  crow 
flies  "  but  as  the  snail  crawls.  And  sure,  there  is  some- 
thing of  the  infinite  in  the  very  monotony  of  this  waste, 
the  vast  sweep  of  the  horizon  only  deepening  this  sense 
of  infinity.  Our  roasting  English  tweeds  make  us  envy 
the  negro  who  peels  to  the  waist  and  wears  the  merest 
wisp  of  garment  round  his  equatorial  regions.  Sun  and 
sand  rule  the  road,  the  sun  smiting  your  head  and  the 
sand  doing  its  exasperating  worst  for  your  feet.  Then, 
ahead,  like  a  lurking  lion,  there  is  the  same  old  perpetual 
puzzle  at  sundown.  To  wit,  how,  where,  and  when  to  get 
the  supposititious  fire  that  will  boil  the  supposititious 
water  locked  in  the  bosom  of  this  desert  ? 

Splitting  the  caravan  into  two,  like  an  orange,  the 
"water"  section  is  left  in  camp  to  wring  a  few  drops  of 
drink  from  that  dry  desert,  whilst  the  faggot-seekers 
scatter  over  the  clean-swept  sand  for  fuel.  It  soon 
comes  out  that,  far  from  thinking  this  "fire  and  water" 
cleavage  a  mere  accident  of  desert  environment,  our 
negro  argues  that  these  two  elements  have  for  centuries 
been  owned  as  the  si'eat  "  Kinjjs  of  Africa."  Ask 
him  to  prove  his  case  for  the  dual  kingship  of  Fire 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY 


159 


and  Water,  and  this  is  how  he  most  quaintly  works  out 
at  the  Euclidean  Q.E.D.  "A  king  indeed  is  King  Fire," 
says  he,  "  for  listen,  oh  listen.  You  pack  all  your 
treasures  into  your  house,  and  {'sweru!')  an  advancing 
forest  fire  having  licked  up  all  the  grass  now  leaps  up  at 
your  thatch,  and  devours  your  all,  licking  up  in  flame 
even  the  last  vestige  of  house  and  goods.  But,  look  ye  ! 
down  dips  the  sun,  the  cold  night  wind  darts  into  your 
body,  and  you  gladly  kneel  before  that  same  King  Fire 
(the  destroyer  of  your  earthly  all),  craving  his  cheering 
warmth.  Yea,  you  beseech  him  to  cook  your  food,  so  little 
dare  you  disdain  King  Fire. 

"  So,  too,  with  King  Water.  The  rushing  water  per- 
chance swallows  in  death  your  loved  first-born,  drowned 
perhaps  in  a  canoe  or  crossing  a  rickety  bridge.  Yea,  he, 
King  Water,  is  the  murderer  of  your  darling,  but  da^rest 
thou  refuse  to  drink  him  ?  Contrariwise,  at  sundown  you 
cringingly  kneel  with  your  cup  and — and  drink  of  your 
son's  murderer !  Hail,  King  Water !  and  hail,  King 
Fire !  though  ye  slay  me,  yet  must  I  cling  to  you." 
Certain  it  is  that,  poetic  ravings  apart,  this  kingship  of 
these  elements  is  a  dry  old  forensic  dictum  among 
negroes,  and  (arson  excepted)  damages  from  fire  and 
water  in  Africa  arc  disallowed  on  the  plea  that  it  is  an 
"  act  of  God." 

More :  next  comes  a  chokiag  simoom,  every  man 
lying  prone  on  the  earth,  head  butting  the  sand.  Good 
it  is  to  see  the  reign  of  Law  even  here,  for  your  nude 
natives  are  a  lawless  lot,  and  the  Lord  thus  gives  them  an 


160 


THINKING  BLACK 


excellent  example  of  His  eternal  equipoise  of  law — these 
howling  sandstorms,  I  mean,  rushing  like  fiends  across 
the  miles  of  blistering  sand.  For,  be  it  noted,  this 
sun  burns,  and  burns,  and  b-u-r-n-s  until,  at  a  certain 
point,  it  seems  to  have  overreached  itself.  Thus  having 
disturbed  by  rarefaction  the  atmospheric  balance,  out 
rush  the  sand-hounds  of  the  desert,  these  whirling 
hurricanes  that  easily  establish  equilibrium  as  by  royal 
command.  They  blind  and  choke  mere  man,  no  doubt, 
but  nevertheless  the  perfect  balance  of  Nature  is  restored 
by  a  perfect  Creator.  Nor  dare  a  snug — and  smug — 
Missionary  claim  exemption  from  a  mouthful  of  dirt  upon 
the  plea  that  God's  message  has  brought  him  to  these 
wilds  :  are  not  "  the  winds  His  messengers  "  too  ?  You'll 
only  get  sand  in  your  teeth  if  you  open  your  mouth  in 
objection.  Moral :  Rain  or  shine,  do  not  tamper  with 
God's  government  of  His  own  Africa. 

This  is  not  all.  Such  real  give  and  take  is  there  in 
this  desert  panorama  that  we  are  not  surprised  when,  by 
way  of  counterpoise,  the  pendulum  swings  from  sand- 
storm to  the  old  hoax  of  mirage.  Curious  policy  of  make- 
believe  this,  for  here  you  have  a  dead  desert  that  long  ago 
has  killed  all  the  poetry  out  of  the  waste ;  here,  wonder 
of  wonders,  is  a  howling  wilderness  in  a  sham  penitential 
way  turning  poet  and  cheating  us  with  mirage.  Stern 
and  forbidding  as  the  earth  is  about  here,  what  is  this  if 
not  the  desert  turning  poet  ?  A  mocking  attempt,  shall 
we  call  it,  to  produce  an  imaginary  oasis  in  lieu  of  the 
real  thing :  else  how  can  you  square  the  undeniable  fact 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY  161 

that  the  uglier  the  desert  the  more  seductive  the  mirage  ? 
(Granted,  the  said  bewitching  mirage  is  as  much  in  you 
as  it  is  in  the  treacherous  desert,  yet  is  it  not  equally 
certain  that,  given  no  desert,  there  can  be  no  mirage?) 
Be  that  as  it  may,  here  is  the  true  tale  of  a  mirage.  Back 
came  our  faggot-searchers  one  by  one,  solemnly  reporting 
a  lake  to  be  seen  away  on  the  Southern  skyline.  The 
oldest  Biheans  with  us  stoutly  refused  to  believe  the  thing, 
until  finally  the  wrangle  came  to  an  issue  in  my  offering 
to  accompany  four  of  our  faithfuls  to  see  for  ourselves  ; 
the  pro  lake  and  pro  mirage  factions  being  both  repre- 
sented. (Rather  reminiscent,  this,  of  the  pro  water,  pro 
fire  sections  we  left  behind. )  So  off  we  start,  heading  due 
South  and  tramping  for  two  solid  hours ;  the  jpro  lake 
prophets  developing  a  somewhat  chastened  optimism  the 
farther  we  penetrated  into  the  void.  On  and  on  we  go, 
hope  finally  sinking  so  low  that  it  seems  to  ooze  out  of 
our  boots — no  lake  visible,  or  likely  to  be.  Only  the  same 
old  outlook  on  a  limitless  ocean  of  sand.  Yet  here  is  a 
blatant  "pro-laker"  at  your  elbow  indoctrinating  you 
with  his  eloquent  fiction  of  a  man-in-the-moon  oasis,  the 
earnest  entreaty  of  the  man  almost  winning  you  over  to 
his  dream.  Certain  it  is,  I  have  the  black  and  white  of 
my  note-book  for  it,  that  I  too  caught  the  same  momen- 
tary mirage,  and  declared  my  own  private  and  unalterable 
conviction  that  the  men  were  right,  for — for  there  was  a 
lake !  But  the  Bihean  who  was  our  guide  enjoyed  my 
greenness,  and  for  many  a  day  afterwards  when  we  met, 
his  face  wore  a  suspicious  smile  suggestive  of  the  fact  that 


162 


THINKING  BLACK 


he  was  still  chewing  the  cud  of  an  exceedingly  pleasant 
jest.  As,  however,  we  had  the  choice  of  either  tramping 
on  South  at  this  rate  for  ten  solid  days  of  desert,  or  going 
back  to  camp,  we  preferred  retreat.  In  all  that  weary 
counter-march  we  sighted  only  two  living  things,  a  jackal 
and  a  sad-faced  gnu ;  our  Biheans  arguing  that  of  the  two 
the  jackal  was  a  peculiarly  succulent  morsel.  Thus  did 
we  prove  that  a  desert,  so  obviously  a  death-trap  in  many 
other  particulars,  caps  all  its  sad  shortcomings  in  this 
accomplished  mendacity  of  mirage.  For  if  water  for  the 
moment  is  not  your  pinch,  then  you  are  sure  to  dream  of 
the  far-away  leeks  and  garlic  of  Egypt.  And  if  per- 
chance the  Army  and  Navy  Stores  have  cheated  the 
wilderness  by  preserving  Egyptian  leeks  and  garlic,  then 
some  other  dream  is  sure  to  appear  as  your  "  will-o'-the- 
wisp  "  of  the  night.  Unfortunately,  we  had  no  animals 
with  us :  a  horse  or  a  donkey  is  never  deceived  by 
mirage.  Smell,  not  sight,  is  their  sure  guide,  and  where  an 
animal  sniffs  not  moisture  you  may  despise  Africa's  most 
seductive  mirage.  Away  in  the  Western  sky,  lo  !  a  dozen 
dark  vultures  hovering  for  the  funeral  of  an  antelope,  the 
official  mourners  these,  come  to  bury  a  denizen  of  the 
plains.  More  than  mourners,  they  are  the  African  grave- 
diggers  ;  and,  more  than  grave-diggers,  they  themselves  are 
the  grave,  the  spades  their  own  beaks. 

#  #  # 

Not  to  mimic  too  much  the  guide-book  style,  let  me 
write  one  word  in  retrospect  on  the  configuration  of  the 
country.    After  crossing  the  Kwanza  Eiver  heading  East, 


THE  DESERT  JOURNEY 


163 


we  encountered  that  curious  switchback  arrangement  of 

hills  for  the  first  week.    Finally  following  this  lively  lot 

of  steeple-chasing  it  over  the  country,  we  are  jolted  down 

into  Luvaleland,  literally  "  the  Flats."    Here  the  joys  of 

the  future  railroad  surveyors  begin,  and  long  level  noiles 

of  country  ahead  will  admit  of  a  railway  running  like  a 

ramrod  due  East.    Kavungu,  afterwards  the  scene  of  the 

sainted  Cyril  Bird's  labours,  was  then  only  a  dark  den  of 

robbers,  and  a  rendezvous  for  all  the  slave  caravans  of  the 

Interior.    Here  it  is  the  muttering  storm  of  revolt  bursts 

on  us,  and  our  craven  carriers  strike  for  higher  wagfes. 

After  a  five  days'  siege  in  our  little  forest  zariba,  the 

enemy  pulls  down  his  flag,  and  all  is  in  train  for  a  start  on 

11th  October  for  the  last  long  stage  of  Eastward  journey. 

Struck  the  upper  reaches  of  the  far-flowing  Zambezi  on 

the  18th,  and  on  the  23rd  swam  across  the  Lukoleshe,  its 

last  feeder  intercepting  our  path.    This  means,  of  course, 

that  the  rivers  ahead  all  shed  off  to  the  Congo  basin  on 

the  North.    You  would  have  applauded  the  army  of 

youngsters  struggling  across  the  broad  Lutikina  where  we 

forded  it  hard  by  the  rapids.    With  load  on  head  they 

pluckily  fought  the  rushing  sheet  of  water,  now  and  then 

making   a   grab   at  some  big  brother  when  the  flow 

threatened  to  swish  them  off  their  feet.    By  the  26th  we 

have,  far  on  our  right,  the  lonely  Kalefie  Hill,  on  which 

dark  spot  the  lights  of  Dr.  and  Mrs.  Fisher's  house 

will  not  begin  to  flicker  for  fourteen  years  to  come.  And 

now  we  begin  to  pull  ourselves  together,  for  we  have 

passed  the  longitudinal  centre  of  the  continent  and  hope 
II 


164 


THINKING  BLACK 


wings  onward.  Then  comes  the  crossing  of  the  Lufupa 
and  Lulua,  two  noble  rivers  in  one  day,  with  laborious 
bridging  of  the  former.  Camping  on  the  off  bank  (oldest 
rule  of  the  road  :  cross  your  last  river  for  the  day  and 
camp !),  the  morrow  sees  us  cutting  across  the  "  Zebra 
Plains  "  ;  no  misnomer  the  name,  for,  superbly  beautiful, 
there  they  are  in  troops  sporting  in  the  sun.  A  sort  of 
safe  postal  address  this,  for  Zebras,  I  fancy.  Where  are  we 
now  ?  Naive  nature  already  suspicions  some  impending 
change  ahead,  and  the  ground  begins  to  echo  a  metallic 
sound.  Pushing  on,  we  pass  within  stone-throw  of  the 
great  Miambo  copper  mines,  a  huge  mass  of  mineral  rock, 
riddled  all  over  with  marks  of  excavations,  and  all 
oxidised  into  green.  Exactly  like  a  great  old  fortress 
shaken  by  war  and  riddled  with  shell.  Frowning  but- 
tresses and  gaping  gashes  all  over.  At  last  comes  the  1st 
of  November  and  dies  memorabilis  of  our  venture.  The 
path  from  our  camp  at  Miambo  is  a  gentle  slope  upwards 
for  an  hour,  then  along  a  level  ridge  boasting  a  stubborn 
growth  of  sharp  cactus.  We  are  not  on  the  easy  descent 
many  minutes,  however,  when  the  hedging  trees  on  all 
sides  disappear,  and  here  is  the  Garenganze  at  last ! 
Across  the  laughing  waters  of  the  Lualaba,  there  we  have 
the  lovely  vision  of  our  blue  Garenganze  hills,  and  another 
(mental)  vision  of  lively  life  ahead.  Thus  it  happened 
that  after  thirty-two  months  of  protracted  endeavour  en 
route,  we  pass  through  the  Western  door  of  Mushidi's 
empire  at  the  Lualaba, 


<^HE  vastness  of  zAfrica  is  vividly  suggested  by  this  map.  India 
(1,574,450  sq.  miles),  China  (1,300,000  sq.  miles),  Surope 
(3,700,000  sq.  miles),  Qreat  'Britain  (122,500  sq.  miles),  and  most  of 
z/fustralia  (2,350,000  sq.  miles)  have  all  been  laid  {drawn  to  the  same 
scale)  on  the  face  of  ^Africa,  and  still  there  are  many  uncovered  plotSy 
equal  to  India  in  bulk.  The  total,  9,046,950  sq.  miles  against  z4frica's 
1 2,000,000. 


BOOK  II 

CHAPTER  X 
Farthest,  but  Shut,  In 


"Solomon,  where  is  thy  glory? 
It's  gone  in  the  wind! 
Babylon !  what  of  thy  story  ? 
It's  gone  in  the  wind ! " 

RUCKERT   (aPPROX.    FROM  GeRMAn). 

*  *  » 

"  On  crossing  the  Lualaba,  I  shall  go  direct  S.W. 
to  the  copper  mines  of  Katanga.  Eight  days  south 
of  Katanga  the  natives  declare  the  fountains  [of  the 
Nile]  to  be.  When  I  have  found  them  I  shall  return 
by  Katanga  to  the  underground  houses  of  Rua  .  .  . 
travel  in  boat  up  the  river  Lufira." 

Livingstone's  Farewell  to  Stanley. 

•  •  * 

*'  You  know  the  hopelessness  of  such  a  task  [as 
African  Missions]  till  you  find  a  St.  Paul  or  a  St. 
John.  Their  r^epresentatives  nowadays  want  so 
much  per  year  and  a  contract." 

General  Gordon  to  Sir  Richard  Burton. 


CHAPTER  X 


Farthest,  but  Shut,  In 

J  jy  HE  RE  AT  the  reader  is  glad, 
for  at  last,   after  thirty-two 
months^  delay  on  the  road,  he  arrives  at 
Mushidts  great  capital. 

YOU  think  that  this  great  negro  London  is  a  choice 
corner  of  the  continent.  Not  a  bit  of  it.  By  way 
of  choosing  a  country  Mushidi  has  blundered  on 
a  bare  brown  stretch  of  soil,  flanked  by  two  ribs  of 
rocky  hills,  scarcely  any  timber  for  fuel  and  a  scarcer 
supply  of  water.  The  city  of  Tantalus  this  Babylon 
should  be  called,  for  the  water,  as  it  were,  is  up 
to  your  chin,  yet  you  can  never  get  at  it : 

"  Water,  water,  everywhere. 
Nor  any  drop  to  drink." 

The  real  rivers  of  the  land,  Lualaba  and  Lufira,  just 
near  enough  on  the  map  to  make  the  teeth  water,  and 
just  far  enough  to  defy  you  to  drink  a  drop.  "Tan- 
talising," we  call  it,  but  the  "thinking  black"  metaphor 
for  this  same  idea  is  the  wild  phra.se,  "the  non-biteable 
elbow"!    "Your  elbow  is  near  to  your  mouth,  but  can 

167 


168 


THINKING  BLACK 


you  bite  it  ? "  ask  these  thirsty  ones.    And  the  reason  ? 
The  story  runs  that  Mushidi  was  born  out  East  in  just 
such  a  barren  type  of  land,  the  tribe  all  drinking  from 
wells,  and  never  seeing  a  fish.     Far  from  being  dis- 
contented with  their  lot,  they  made  necessity  a  virtue 
and  put  the  w^hole  tribe  under  stern  prohibition  of 
fish,  this  taboo  going   down   to   endless  generations. 
Here,  then,  you  find  Mushidi's  reason  for  scorning  the 
banks  of  such  a  noble  river  as  the  Lualaba — did  not 
the  despotism  of  custom  doom  thousands  of  souls  to 
renounce  a  fish  diet  ?    The  dead  ancestors  of  Mushidi 
really  rule  the  land  from  their  graves  in  the  Far  East, 
and  they  alone  are  the  supreme  arbiters  in  morals. 
"Thou  shalt  not  eat  fish,"  say  a  thousand  dead  men, 
and  Mushidi's  millions  quake  "  Amen."    Let  the  living 
defy  the  voice  of  the  dead  :  let  them  say.  The  times 
are  changed  and  we  change  with  them — say  this  in 
Africa  and   at   once  the  door  of  the   spirit-world  is 
slammed  in  their  faces,  and  their  guardian  spirits  are 
turned  to  be  their  enemies.    So  here  we  are  doomed 
to  drink  dirty  water  for  many  a  day,  the  potion  so 
putrid  that   it  is  impossible  to  drink  any  that  has 
lain  overnight.  » 

It  is  at  the  Nkulu  end  of  this  capital  that  Mushidi 
has  his  headquarters,  and  here  the  Arabs  have  built 
him  his  Castle  of  Indolence  in  wattle  and  daub,  a  large 
but  very  shabby  relation  of  Buckingham  Palace.  A 
cold,  cheerless,  mud  barn,  really,  the  grass  roof  forlnddiug 
a  chimney.    In  Africa  a  room  without  a  fireplace — and 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  169 

there  are  too  many  such — is  like  a  head  without  eyes 
in  it,  a  face  without  a  smile.  You  shiver  in  it  even 
when  the  air  is  warm,  and  you  wonder  why  you  do 
so.  Not  so  the  negro.  The  first  Luban  who  saw  a 
fire  on  the  hearth  deplored  such  a  wicked  waste  of 
fuel,  and  on  seeing  the  flame  running  up  the  chimney, 
actually  proposed  to  run  up  after  it.  If  all  the  heat 
goes  out  at  the  top,  why  not  take  the  overland  route, 
why  not  climb  the  roof,  squat  on  the  chimney,  and 
catch  it  coming  out  ? 

In  the  days  when  I  was  the  only  white  skin  at 
Bunkeya  I  got  to  size  up  my  Mushidi  rather  closely. 
Here  the  five  hundred  wives  stream  in  on  him  with 
well-cooked  dainties,  for  do  they  not  all  vie  with  each 
other  to  capture  the  Chiefs  citadel,  his  stomach  ?  The 
prose  of  this  culinary  combat,  if  converted  into  the  poetry 
of  porridge,  probably  runs  : — 

"The  turnpike  road  to  royal  hearts,  I  find, 
Lies  through  their  mouths,  or  I  mistake  mankind." 

Thus  it  Cometh  to  pass  that,  pampered  with  negro 
luxury  and  softened  by  sloth,  strength  is  forsaking 
Mushidi's  limbs  as  common  sense  his  skull,  and  the  old 
tale  is  once  again  true  that  luxury  is  the  conqueror 
of  conquerors.  He  never  dreams  what  a  great  luxury 
it  is  to  dispense  with  luxury.  Hungry  as  I  often  am 
these  days,  Mushidi  and  I  dine  together  on  all  manner 
of  messes,  the  only  other  invited  guests  being  one  or 
two  tiny  negro  tots  who  cannot  aspire  to  be  Mushidi's 


170 


THINKING  BLACK 


rivals.  I  suppose  it  is  on  the  principle  of  the  smallest 
stars  being  nearest  the  sun  that  these  doll-guests  are 
allowed  to  join  us,  for  even  a  group  of  elders  is  driven 
off  and  expected  to  eat  our  leavings.  Mushidi's  favourite 
name  is  that  of  a  forest  tree,  and  the  loftier  the  tree, 
remember,  the  less  shade  there  is  at  its  foot.  So  Mushidi's 
very  loftiness  makes  him  lonely  enough  at  these  feasts. 
Even  aristocrats  like  Talashio  and  Mumomeka  are  waved 
off.  Of  course,  knives  and  forks  are  taboo,  for  why  bring 
weapons  of  death  to  a  feast,  the  emblem  of  life  ? 
Spurning,  therefore,  such  new-fangled  vulgarities  of 
Europe,  we  follow  the  oldest  track  of  the  sons  of  men 
leading  to  the  cooking-pot,  and  washing,  our  fingers 
scrupulously,  here  we  are  in  imagination  sitting  down 
with  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob,  using  Adam's  knives 
and  forks.  Once,  indeed,  I  produced  a  pocket-knife 
wherewith  to  aid  mastication,  but  the  startled  king, 
alarmed  at  this  lapse  of  decorum,  seemed  to  imagine 
I  was  going  to  dine  off,  instead  of  with,  him.  There  is 
sense,  too,  in  this  anti  -  knife  idea,  for  surely  we  lose 
our  good  teeth  for  the  similar  reason  as  the  savage 
has  beauties.  Our  innovation  of  knives  and  forks  has 
done  it  all ;  you  cannot  have  your  cake  and  eat  it, 
and  if  a  knife  does  the  work  of  the  teeth,  then  you  lose 
the  latter  for  the  former. 

It  sounds  very  simple  so  to  leap  back  a  thousand 
years  in  table  etiquette,  but  the  fact  is,  to  sup  with 
primitive  man  you  feel  quite  nervous  about  your  first 
dinner-party.     Only  one  dish  is  allowed,  and  you  are 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  171 

even  denied  any  liquid  assistance  to  wash  it  down.  Hav- 
ing heard  rumours  of  our  "grace  before  meat"  doings, 
Mushidi  quite  seriously  wanted  me  to  shut  my  eyes  while 
he  kept  his  open  "  to  see  how  it  was  done."  Like  the 
young  heathen  "  Huck,"  it  seems  to  him  droll,  so  droll, 
this  inability  to  proceed  right  oflF  with  our  eating,  without 
first  of  all  mumbling  something  over  the  food — yet  there 
is  nothing  wrong  with  it.  When  he  asked  if  he  should 
"  say  grace  "  too,  I  gave  him  a  nasty  nag  by  answering, 
"  No  !  For  it  is  written  that  God  hath  created  meats  to 
be  received  with  thanksgiving  of  them  which  believe  and 
know  the  truth."  "  Say  something  to  God  about  the 
food  "  is  a  curious  (and  not  bad)  phrasing  of  the  request 
for  grace  before  meat.  Farther  out  East,  where  raiding 
is  customary  on  the  outskirts  of  some  Christian  native 
schools,  the  rumour  runs  that  warriors  reckon  on  the  very 
devotions  of  the  saints  to  swoop  down  and  do  cattle- 
lifting.  Like  Mushidi,  who  asks  me  to  pray  while  he 
keeps  his  eyes  open  and  watches,  these  freebooters  say  : 
"  Yes,  let  us  wait  till  they  shut  their  eyes  and  pray,  then 
when  their  eyes  are  shut  we  will  steal  their  cattle." 
Thus  the  very  phrase  "to  shut  the  eyes"  ultimately 
works  out  at  the  very  curious  idea  of  "  living  for  eternity," 
the  thought  being  that  the  man  who  so  prays  is  oblivious 
to  the  mere  temporalities  of  life,  for  does  he  not  shut  his 
eyes  and  look  ofi"  to  the  unseen  ? 

And  so  the  royal  meal  goes  forward  with  great  de- 
corum, our  stony  silence  only  broken  by  the  dip  of  each 
sop  ("a  boat"  they  call  it)  into  the  sauce.     No  spoon 


172 


THINKING  BLACK 


allowed,  so  you,  the  possessor  of  a  richly  developed  sense 
of  humour,  must  mop  up  the  gravy  with  a  sop  of  mush. 
Talk  about  manners,  some  of  the  royal  notions  of  bon  ton 
make  you  fancy  you  are  dining  in  the  moon.  Yet  how 
can  I  laugh  at  him  when  I  remember  that  our  own  Henry 
the  Eighth,  with  magnificent  unconcern,  did  also  eat  with 
his  fingers  ?  And  when  hungry  would  he  not  take  up  his 
victuals  and  swallow  them  in  handfuls  at  a  time  ?  Why, 
Mushidi  in  comparison  is  as  polite  as  a  dancing-master. 

Be  it  noted,  this  puzzling  Mushidi  is  keen  on  writing, 
and  here  in  Bunkeya  it  is  a  sight  to  see  every  paltry 
scrap  of  paper  prized  almost  more  than  cloth.  One  man 
after  another  treats  a  bit  of  old  newspaper  as  tenderly  as 
a  crisp  bank-note,  a  rumour  having  come  in  from  the  far 
Ocean  that  our  race  was  really  "  ruled  by  paper.!'  Even 
calico  is  common,  they  say,  but  does  not  paper  buy 
calico  ?  So  they  seize  on  every  scrap  they  can  find,  and 
soon  you  sec  the  Chief  scrawling  on  it  a  rapid  Pitman's 
system  of  shorthand  kind  of  writing.  Since  the  days  of 
old  when  his  ancestors  scribbled  with  sepia  on  papyrus, 
this  is  the  first  timid  dip  into  the  great  ocean  of  Literature 
by  the  mighty  negro.  With  a  dexterous  sweep  of  your 
borrowed  pencil  he  flashes  along  the  paper  in  a  curious 
switchback  manner,  the  lines  crossing  and  recrossing  each 
other  in  a  hopeless  tangle.  Oh !  ye  who  have  seen  a 
spider  crawl  out  of  an  inkstand  and  stroll  across  a  sheet 
of  letter-paper  ;  never  since  then  have  you  seen  the  equal 
in  penmanship.  And  all  this  crooked  calligraphy  because 
we  as  a  white  race  are  ruled  by  i)aper,  forgetful  of  the 


FARTHEST,  BDT  SHUT,  IN  173 

fact  that  although  paper  rules  us,  we  at  least  rule  our 
paper.  What  a  black-and-white  jumble  of  crooked  lines  ! 
"  Medicine,"  is  what  he  calls  it,  and,  truth  to  tell,  so 
cryptic  does  it  look  that,  in  England,  after  vainly  trying 
to  decipher  same,  one  would  most  naturally  send  it  round 
to  the  local  chemist  to  be  made  up  as  a  prescription. 

This  "  black-art"  notion  of  letter- writing  has  got  such 
a  cunning  grip  of  the  negro  brain  that  even  your  own 
black  boy  will  recall  you  on  urgent  business  by  scrawling 
a  few  lines  of  zigzag  nonsense  on  a  bare  sheet  of  paper. 
The  real  message,  of  course,  is  verbal,  but  these  magic 
lines  of  criss-cross  could  not  be  omitted.    Is  there  any 
significance  in  the  fact  that  the  negro  word  "  to  write  " 
is  only  the  word  "  to  tattoo,"  and  does  he  think  that  we 
tattoo  on  paper  precisely  as  he  does  on  his  body  ?  Even 
Mushidi,  who  does  not  believe  in  discretion  being  the 
better  part  of  valour,  has  been  known  to  scrawl  one  of 
these  vainglorious  cryptograms  to  his  enemy  in  arms. 
I  wonder,  does  he  think  that  to  have  it  out  in  black  and 
white  is  better  than  settling  scores  in  black  and  blue  ? 
Along  with  this  funny  stenography  he  (joyously  scenting 
battle !)  takes  great  good  care  to  send  the  eloquent 
present  of  a  hoe  and  bag  of  bullets,  offering  his  enemy 
a  this-or-that  choice — peace  or  war,  bullets  or  hoe  ?  A 
sort  of  heathen  Parcels  Post  arrangement  this,  I  suppose, 
with  accompanying  communication  per  Letter  Post. 

No  notion  has  he  that  in  this  writing  of  ours  we  catch 
the  living  thought  as  a  word  and  imprison  it  on  paper. 
The  exact  idea  he  seems  to  have  of  the  business  is  akin 


174 


THINKING  BLACK 


to  that  of  the  little  girl  who  thinks  that  by  pressing  the 
button  she  has  thereby  made  the  electric  light.  Pushing 
investigations,  it  leaks  out  that  the  Arabs  have  for  long 
years  juggled  with  the  art  of  writing,  this  indeed  being 
their  greatest  asset  among  raw  natives.  It  is  magic  or 
nothing.  Do  they  not  believe  that  the  most  potent 
medicine  is  simply  a  written  line  of  the  Koran,  swallowed 
by  the  sufferer  ?  A  literal  use  this  of  the  prophet 
Jeremiah's  saying  :  "  Thy  words  were  found,  and  I  did  eat 
them,"  The  leaves  of  the  Tree  of  Life  are  medicinal,  but 
so,  too,  argues  the  Arab,  are  literal  leaves  of  a  book. 
Little  wonder,  then,  the  African  clutches  at  the  new  idea 
of  writing,  for  when  he  sees  us  reading  he  wakens  as 
from  a  nightmare  to  discover  that  the  whole  heap  of  the 
past  experiences  of  his  race  is  lost  to  ken  because  of 
this  lack  of  a  literature.  Yes,  all  the  accumulated  negro 
wisdom  of  centuries  might  have  been  his  heritage  if  only 
somebody  had  dreamed  of  writing  them  down.  But  as  it 
is,  every  black  boy  is  thrown  on  the  hard  knocks  of  the 
world  as  though  he  were  living  in  the  year  after  Adam 
fell — no  past  treasure  of  written  wisdom. 

Probably,  too,  the  negro  vice  of  congenital  lying  flows 
from  this  same  source  of  booklessness.  For  they  have 
nothing  down  in  black  and  white.  Promises  are  merely 
verbal,  not  written,  therefore  the  hardest-mouthed  negro 
wins.  Had  he  committed  himself  to  writing,  then,  follow- 
ing the  Arab  idea  of  masticating  paper,  a  hundred  liars 
could  be  made  literally  to  eat  their  written  lies.  Did  not 
Christ  meet  all  the  Devil's  lies  with  the  one  silencing 


A  Typical  "Wipe  out," 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  175 

phrase  :  "  It  is  written  "  ?  Is  this  what  Job  means  when 
he  cries  :  "  Oh  that  mine  enemy  had  written  a  book  ! "  ? 
Certainly  the  African  lias  nothing  in  writing,  hence  flows 
this  flood  of  falsehood.  Hence,  too,  that  proverb  of 
theirs,  "When  the  rabbit  was  promised  beans  he  pro- 
duced a  basket,"  the  idea  being  that  a  verbal  promise  is  only 
valid  when  it  is  uttered,  and  not  later.  Art  thou  promised 
beans  ?    Then  produce  thy  basket  and  carry  them  ofi". 

Exasperated  at  this  lack  of  definite  data,  they  (and 
wouldn't  you  ?)  have  many  a  funny  expedient  to  fix 
facts  in  the  mind.  When  I  saw  the  Prince  Chamunda 
he  was  almost  buried  in  a  great  coil  of  knotted  cord  :  his 
perpetual  calendar  this,  of  the  passing  days.  Run  on  the 
decimal  system,  every  tenth  knot  is  double,  and  as  he 
gazed  on  the  increasing  heap  a  sorry  sigh  escaped  him. 
Thinking  me  sadly  lacking  in  scholastic  culture,  this  man 
laughed  at  my  month  of  four  weeks  :  he  made  it  one 
week  =  ten  days,  therefore  thirty  days  =  three  weeks.  If 
a  month,  says  he,  how  can  you  divide  it  by  four  ?  But 
this  pioneer  in  time-tables  was  soon  wiped  out,  for  finally 
the  town  rose  against  him  and  shrieked  that  this 
"  numbering  of  the  days  "  was  witchcraft :  was  he  not 
merely  counting  out  the  days  of  his  neighbours  unto 
burial  ?  Thus  they  strangled  reform — a  badly  needed  one 
too,  for  quite  an  aged  man  will  tell  you  blandly  that  he 
is  ten  years  of  age.  Is  this  calculation  correct  after  all  ? 
Does  he  mean  that,  sleeping  away  three-quarters  of  his  life 
as  he  does,  it  is  fair  only  to  count  the  meagre  margin  that 
remains  of  non-slept  time  ?    Days  they  can  count,  but  as 


176 


THINKING  BLACK 


for  mere  hours !  Not  one  clock  or  watch  in  the  whole 
land,  and  their  mighty  sun  overhead  is  so  very  much  the 
national  timepiece  that  whether  you  innovate  a  "  Water- 
bury  "  or  an  eight-day  clock,  "  sun  "  {nsaa)  is  the  only 
name  they  can  give  such  a  tantalising  ticker.  And  here 
it  is  in  this  clockless  life  you  find  the  real  root  of  his 
happy-go-lucky  existence ;  never  did  that  irritating  tick- 
tack  tick-tack  set  the  African  nerves  on  edge ;  never  did 
that  everlasting  click-click  of  the  terrible  escapement  of 
a  watch  put  him  on  his  mettle  as  a  man.  This  to  a 
negro — to  put  it  mildly — would  be  equivalent  to  dying  a 
peculiarly  unpleasant  and  unnecessary  kind  of  death. 
Time  is  passing,  quickly  passing ;  "  but,*'  objects  the 
negro,  "  why  nag  out  the  truth  so  brutally,  why  this 
relentless  repetition  ? " 

If  it  be  permissible  to  English  the  famous  line  of 
Schiller,  "  The  happy  hear  no  clock,"  then,  certes,  all 
Africa  would  arise  and  claim  that  great  German  as  their 
anti-timepiece  champion.  The  pretensions,  too,  of  this 
preposterous  little  thing  called  a  "  sun,"  still  at  it  after 
sundown,  still  bustling  on  through  the  night  with  a  tick 
like  a  fever  pulse  !  A  "  sun  "  ?  why,  the  sun,  the  genuine 
article,  has  set  long  ago.  Yet  the  commonest  form  of 
treating  the  first  few  watches  that  came  in  from  the 
Atlantic  was  to  keep  them  swaying  to  and  fro — lest  they 
stopped.  But  they  inconsistently  object  to  the  very 
thing  they  encouraged.  One  old  man  solemnly  resolved 
to  boil  his  ticker  by  way  of  curing  it  of  this  "  bee-like 
buzzing  in  the  belly "  ;   and  another  negro  (younger, 


^    FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  177 

therefore  wiser)  frankly  solved  the  problem  by  eviscerating 
the  inner  wheels.  With  a  kind  of  lofty  obstinacy,  these 
negroes  would  listen  not  at  all  to  my  short  but  masterly 
account  of  their  delicate  mechanism,  and  finally  the  poor 
palpitating  watches  were  "  killed  "  neatly  and  thoroughly, 
their  tin  cases  becoming  the  smart  snuff-boxes  of  such 
smart  Africans. 

Another  attempt  1  saw  at  negro  recording  was  in  a 
little  hut  where  I  slept.  Looking  up  to  the  beehive  roof 
I  spied  a  number  of  tiny  white  flags  flying,  mere  ribbons 
of  calico  these,  some  grimed  with  soot,  and  one  quite  new. 
"  Oh  ! "  said  the  owner  thereof,  "  these  are  receipts  of 
debts  I  have  paid."  Commoner  still  is  it  to  find  little 
packets  of  twigs  scrupulously  tied  together,  the  varying 
sizes  all  eloquent  of  some  transaction  represented  by  these 
vouchers — a  long  tusk  of  ivory,  for  instance,  being 
memorised  by  a  longish  twig,  and  so  on  in  ratio  right 
round  the  various  sorts  and  sizes  of  tusks. 

*  *  * 

The  royal  "  sneeze,"  I  find,  is  a  solemn  event  here  in 
Court  life.  For  if  this  Mushidi  can  produce  a  successful 
sneeze  in  public,  then  the  thousands  of  negroes  acclaim 
such  a  sovereign  act  with  a  thunder  of  hand-clapping  : 
"  Long  live  the  King  !  Hail  !  "  Therefore  the  oftener  he 
so  sneezes  the  longer  is  he  supposed  to  live,  the  idea 
being  that  a  sneeze  is  only  a  superabundance  of  life 
overflowing  in  friendly  fizz.  A  paroxysm  of  sneezing 
only  evokes  a  chorus  of  approval,  and  one  almost  suspects 
that  the  old  man  is  addicted  to  the  very  snuffing  that  is 


178 


THINKING  BLACK 


taboo.  As,  therefore,  all  ~  his  oppressed  subjects  are 
presumably  longing  for  Mushidi's  death,  this  is  the  reason 
for  his  so  theatrically  brandishing  this  sneeze  in  their 
faces.  A  sort  of  health  certificate  it  is,  notifying  all 
comers  that  there  is  life  in  "  the  old  boy  "  yet,  for  has  not 
the  champagne  of  life  still  some  fizz  in  it  ?  Oh,  that 
beaming  smile  of  hope  spreading  across  the  monarch's 
countenance  when  he  is  waiting  for  his  sneeze,  notice  of 
whose  arrival  has  been  telegraphed  in  advance.  A-a-a- 
atchoo  !  comes  the  mighty  deed,  and  the  roar  of  response 
is  so  loud  that  you  can  almost  understand  what 
Xenophon  means  when  he  tells  you  of  the  famous  sneeze 
that  decided  the  fate  of  Athens.  For  is  not  this  sneeze 
as  historic  as  it  is  international  ?  Compare  in  ancient 
Greece  the  greeting  "  Zeus  preserve  thee  "  after  a  sneeze. 
Or  in  ancient  Italy  the  phrase,  "  Sit  salutiferum,"  with  its 
modern  Italian  equivalent,  "  Felicita."  Or  the  German 
"  Gesundheit,"  the  French  "  Bonne  sant^,"  and  the  North 
of  England  "  Bless  the  bairn,"  all  after  a  solemn  sneeze. 
The  contrary,  too,  is  also  seen  when  His  Majesty  is 
indisposed,  a  mere  royal  headache  or  cold  sending  a 
shiver  through  the  land.  In  Russia,  one  tear  in  the 
Czar's  eye  is  said  to  cost  a  thousand  pocket-handkerchiefs  ; 
but  Mushidi,  he  goes  farther,  and  resolves  that  if  he 
cannot  sleep  he  will  let  nobody  else  do  so,  saint  or  sinner. 
Many  a  midnight  messenger  does  he  send  ofi"  to  us  to  call 
the  "  men  of  God,"  and  he  gives  his  royal  word  with  a 
royal  oath  that  our  medicines  mean  "Life  Eternal." 
"  Kapali  Vali  Okufa!"  he  said  as  he  gazed  at  the 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  179 

bottles  of  physic:  "There  is  no  more  death."  The  old 
Napoleonic  phrase,  "  As  false  as  a  bulletin,"  becomes  quite 
the  common  idea  at  Mushidi's  Court.  "  Eternal  health  " 
is  his  dream — but  remember  the  average  eternity  of  a 
negro  lasts  only  six  weeks.  A  most  nerve-racking  ordeal 
any  such  "  treatment"  ever  is,  because  the  native  "  witch- 
doctors "  are  usually  attacked  for  failure,  and  frictions 
abound.  A  favourite  method  of  disposing  of  a  nasty 
drug  is  the  common  African  device  of  taking  the  dose,  not 
in  person,  but  by  proxy,  the  real  sick  man  believing  that 
if  even  his  cousin  drinks  it  for  him,  then  the  healing 
virtue  will  be  the  same.    Have  they  not  the  same  blood  ? 

Or  smoke  your  medicine  in  a  pipe,  as  one  patient  of 
mine  did.  Busy  with  something  else,  and  mindful  of  the 
dictum  that  the  whole  art  of  medicine  consists  in  judicious 
poisoning,  I  gave  the  lady  three  tabloids,  leaving  her  to 
dispose  of  them  in  the  easy  and  elementary  mode  of  such 
a  pampered  form  of  dispensing.  Swallow  them  ?  Not 
she,  my  lady.  Meeting  her  an  hour  afterwards,  the 
only  answer  this  negro  sister  gave  was  by  pointing 
silently  to  the  huge  gourd  pipe  she  was  then  smoking. 
Nor  could  I  remotely  guess  what  the  solemn-faced 
sacrifice  meant  by  this  pointing  in  such  a  scared  way  to 
her  pipe,  until  my  eye  caught  the  poor  tabloids  roasting 
in  the  bowl  like  coffee-beans.  She  cannot  conceive  how 
decisive  is  a  doctor's  dose,  but  in  a  kindly  way  a])prove3 
all  she  can.  Put  the  clinical  thermometer  in  her  mouth 
for  a  few  seconds,  and  she  sucks  it  solemnly  for  healing 
virtue.    Remove  now  the  said  instrument  and  wave  her 


180 


THINKING  BLACK' 


oflF — back  she  comes  to-morrow  for— for  a  second  suck, 
the  thermometer  having  worked  mightily,  yea  mentally. 
She  means,  doubtless,  to  be  cured  by  degrees.  But  Mr. 
Missionary,  being  a  bit  of  a  quack  in  his  own  quiet  way, 
often  finds  his  awkward  and  rather  prickly  professional 
pride  humbled.  He  is  nettled  that  the  negro  does  not 
believe  in  him,  and  shivers  even  in  the  sunshine  when 
he  recalls  Voltaire's  biting  phrase  about  pouring  "  drugs 
of  which  we  know  little  into  bodies  of  which  we  know 
less."  A  good  treatment  in  Europe  can  be  fatal  in 
Africa.  Mercury,  for  example,  specific  among  Europeans, 
is,  dose  for  dose,  certain  death  to  a  negro.  A  proof  this, 
of  Voltaire's  phrase. 

The  commoner  pest  is  the  malingerer  who  wants  your 
healing  balm.  Balm,  of  course,  in  a  bottle,  the  said 
bottle  to  possess  a  cork — for  is  she  not  in  a  sinking  con- 
dition ?  Round  the  corner,  in  brisk  business  fashion, 
out  goes  the  medicine  and  in  goes  the  snufi",  the  bottle 
with  the  cork  having  seemingly  saved  this  sinking  sable 
sister.  The  same  lady  this  who  treats  your  Gospel  in 
the  same  way,  swallows  the  sermon  and  spits  out  the 
salvation.  Contrast  their  treatment  of  one  of  their  own 
old  devil-doctors.  He,  oh,  he  is  revered,  and  all 
because  he  makes  them  pay  through  the  nose,  even 
demanding  an  initial  fee,  Chiteo,  before  he  stoops  to 
take  any  case  in  hand.  The  real  professional  he.  One 
such  I  found  threatening  a  patient  with  sudden  gunshot- 
death  if  he  failed  to  find  the  fees — had  cured  his  man  and 
then  proposed  to  kill  him  for  the  cure  I    He  laughed  at 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  181 

me  for  manifestly  saving  a  dysentery  case  with  lead  and 
opium  and  getting  nothing  for  it — he  would  have  shot 
the  very  man  he  had  cured.  In  other  words,  would  have 
given  him  the  lead  without  the  opium. 

*  *  *  ^ 

But  what  is  this  Mushidi  who  thus  drags  his  weary, 
wicked  way  through  these  pages  ? 

Here  is  his  history  in  a  nutshell.  Long  ago,  as  a 
mere  adventurer,  he  wriggled  into  the  Lufira  valley  from 
the  Far  East,  his  followers  numbering  three  men  plus  his 
wife,  Kapapa — grand  total,  five  souls.  He  is  heading 
for  Mpande,  the  Sanga  Copper  King,  this  chief  having 
covenanted  friendship  with  Mushidi's  father,  Kalasa. 
Here,  then,  you  have  the  thin  edge  of  the  wedge  of  this 
future  despotism,  for  this  Bulunda  covenant  is  of 
genuine  sanctity  among  raw.  unsophisticated  natives. 
More  than  a  mere  chance  acquaintance,  he  it  is,  this 
covenanted  "  friend,"  who  must  stick  closer  than  a 
brother. 

Now,  the  brother,  or  brothers,  as  in  the  case  of 
this  Copper  King,  had  failed  him  at  the  crucial  point, 
and  is  there  not  a  Bantu  proverb  that  declares  a  brother 
is  born  for  adversity  ?  Yet  here  was  Mpande  attacked 
from  the  North  by  Lubans,  all  his  harem  kidnapped, 
and  no  Sanga  kinsman  forthcoming  to  lend  a  fraternal 
hand — this,  forsooth,  in  the  teeth  of  the  basic  Bantu 
proverb-law  that  a  brother  is  horn  for  adversity.  Who 
ever  dared  in  Africa  to  fly  in  the  face  of  a  proverb  ?  Is 
it  not  the  smallest  possible  means  of  conveying  the  largest 


182 


THINKING  BLACK 


amount  of  wisdom  ?  But  here  in  the  nick  of  time  succour 
does  arrive.  Look  at  this  travel-stained  band  of  four 
men  and  a  woman  filing  into  the  Sanga  stockade  at  sun- 
down :  is  not  this  Mushidi,  son  of  the  covenanted  "  friend," 
Kalasa?  Truly,  here  is  a  friend  that  sticketh  closer 
than  a  brother.  And  there  the  whole  story  begins,  yea, 
there  also  it  ends,  for  there  is  nothing  more  to  tell. 
Mushidi  said,  "  J"  y  suis,fy  reste."  A  born  manipulator  of 
mankind,  he  made  his  dispositions  accordingly,  and  with  a 
mere  handful  of  men  followed  up  the  Lubans,  attacked 
by  night,  and  rescued  the  kidnapped  Sanga  folks.  Watch 
the  momentous  sequel.  There  and  then,  in  the  double 
heat  of  gratitude  to  the  "  friend "  and  rancour  to  the 
deserting  "  brother,"  a  solemn  pact  was  sealed  :  punning 
a  variant  on  the  old  proverb,  the  grateful  Copper  King 
in  one  historic  precedent  cut  off  all  his  blood  kinsmen 
"without  a  shilling"  in  the  declaration:  "A  friend  in 
need  is  a  brother  indeed !  Thou,  Mushidi,  art  my 
Nswana,  or  heir  apparent ;  on  thee  only  I  bestow  the 
Omande  shell !  "  Now,  here  in  this  daring  but  dangerous 
ignoring  of  sacred  blood  kinsmanship  you  have  the 
slumbering  casus  belli  of  the  long-subsequent  revolt  of 
the  Sanga  tribe.  Here,  too,  you  have  the  mainsprings 
of  Mushidi's  bloody  policy  in  these  later  years — does  he 
not  know  that  on  the  first  sign  of  weakness  the  real 
aboriginal  lords  of  the  Sanga  soil  will  give  his  foreign 
carcase  to  the  fowls  of  the  air  ?  Here,  too,  you  find 
Mushidi's  subtle  reason  for  the  building  of  a  negro 
cosmopolitan   state — docs   he  not  know   tliat   in  this 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  183 

vast  polyglot  capital  the  aboriginal  Sanga  folks  are 
outvoted  ? 

Let  it  not  be  supposed,  however,  that  to  root  out  the 
aborigines  is  an  easier  thing  to  perform  than  to  plan. 
These  lords  of  the  copper  country,  I  have  explained,  are 
the  Va  Sanga,  and  a  very  poor  sort  of  tribe  of  Judah, 
because  their  totem  is  "The  Lion."  Copying  the  lion, 
they  alone  boast  a  bearded  manhood,  and  the  longer  the 
beard  the  more  ideal  the  Sanga  man.  They  spend  years 
on  the  task  of  teaching  this  tribal  beard  to  make  a 
wonderful  copy  of  Felis  leo,  and  the  Sanga  man's  heart- 
break is  when  he  can  only  imitate  a  billygoat.  The  black 
Sanga  showing  his  white  teeth  through  the  foliage  of  a 
long  black  beard,  and  rolling  his  "r's"  like  the  Northum- 
brian burr — this  is  all  the  portrait  you  need  of  him.  Yet 
he  has  the  real  title-deeds,  and  when  Mushidi  trained 
these  Va  Sanga  as  elephant-hunters  he  little  guessed  that 
one  day,  in  revolt,  they  would  draw  a  most  careful  bead 
on  every  Yeke  man  sighted  in  the  bush. 

( Later. ) 

This  negro  potentate  is  nothing  if  not  superlative,  and 
quite  early  in  his  curious  career  he  resolves,  in  a  blaze  of 
tinsel  glory,  to  wed  a  "  white  wife."  So,  with  all  his 
Eastern  antipathies,  he  turns  naturally  to  the  West  Coast, 
and  in  the  pliant  Portuguese  sees  the  very  men  who  will 
negotiate  the  dirty  "  deal."  Are  they  not  keen  black 
slavers,  and  might  they  not  return  the  compliment  by 
selling  him  a  white  wife  ?  He  even  presented  his  heathen 
compliments  to  His  Excellency  the  Governor  of  St.  Paul 


184 


THINKING  BLACK 


de  Loanda,  requesting  the'  hand  of  any  of  his  young 
daughters — the  ivory  dowry  fixed  at  thirty  tusks.  Fail- 
ing in  this,  his  quest  out  along  the  Benguella  road  was 
more  successful.    The  stinging  sarcasm  of  the  proposal 
was  of  course  quite  lost  on  the  degraded  Portuguese,  and 
one  grim  day,  yes !  "  Madam  Mushidi "  actually  arrived 
from  the  far  West.    What  a  zenith  hour  for  Bluebeard 
when  that  daring  item,  so  long  down  in  his  programme, 
was  marked  off"  as  fact  stranger  than  fiction.    Then  it  was 
he  proclaimed  himself  by  the  name  "  Telwatelwawatel- 
wanekumwineputu " — the  spelling  is  mine,  reader,  the 
pronunciation  thine.    This  means,  "  The  always-spoken- 
of-one,  spoken-of-eveu-in-the-Courts-of-Europe,"  and  the 
title  is  a  one-word  unit  rattled  off"  breathlessly  with  no 
pause. ^    But  Mushidi  was  far  too  clever  a  person  to  see 
anything  exactly  as  it  was,  nor  did  he  dream  of  those 
domestic  bickerings  in  store  for  His  Majesty.    A  plain 
man  had  married  a  brilliant  woman,  but  what  plain  man 
wants  a  blaze  of  fireworks  at  his  fireside  ?    Certainly  not 
this  type  of  woman,  for  I  once  heard  her  call  Mushidi  "  a 
pig."    Maria  de  Fonseca  was  her  name,  her  father  a 
Portuguese  officer ;  the  proud  brother  being  the  famous 
(or   notorious)    Senhor   Coimbra,   who   lived   west  of 
Bailundu.    The  same  rogue  this,  Lourengo  da  Souza 
Coimbra,  who  with  his  gang  of  fifty-two  slaves  tied  in 
lots  of  seventeen  or  eighteen,  fell  in  with  Lovett  Cameron 

'  If  you  ask  me  liow  to  pronounce  this  long-as-a-coniet  name,  may  I 
parenthetically  reply  that  it  is  done  the  way  a  rrreat  man  said  he  pronounced 
"Chicago"  ?    "I  never  pronounce  it,"  said  he. 


FARTHEST,  BUT  SHUT,  IN  185 

in  Luba  country.    This  man  wrote  a  dying  charge  com- 
mitting the  guardianship  of  his  empress-niece  to  me,  and 
Maria  de  Fonseca  was  always  very  clannish  to  her  own 
colour,  calling  them  "brothers."     "Queen  Caf^-au-lait " 
is  a  happy  description  of  her  own  pigment,  but  Mushidi 
always  condescendingly  calls  her  "  our  white  sister."  The 
sombre  complacency  of  this  degrading  union  is  the 
dreariest  part  of  it  all,  the  Portuguese  having  merely  sold 
the  woman  for  a  few  hundred  pounds.    From  the  Mushidi 
standpoint,  however,  what  he  needed  badly  was  an  awe- 
inspiring  prestige  so  great  that  the  tribes  lining  his  trade 
route  out  to  the  Atlantic  will  not  dare  to  molest  his 
caravans.    For  like  the  old  Waooao  tricks  on  the  road 
East  to  Zanzibar  these  Luvale  live  on  the  looting  of 
passing  caravans,  and  no  sooner  does  a  caravan  pass  into 
the  Interior  than  these  Luvale  begin  to  plot  its  pro- 
spective plunder  on   the  return  journey.    Thus  even 
Mushidi's  slave  clientele  run  a  risky  game,  for  their  road 
out  west  is  bristling  with  Luvale  "  gas-pipe  "  guns.  Sold 
by  the  stupid  Biheans  to  the  sly  Luvale,  the  very  guns 
they  sold  were  pointed  against  them.    This  is  why 
Kavungu  is  the  great  half-way  point  on  which  all  home- 
ward-bound Biheans  concentrate ;  and  only  when  they 
have  massed  in  their  thousands  will  they  dare  to  sally  out 
on  the  western  road.    Hence,  then,  the  diplomacy  of 
planning  this  Portuguese   marriage,  for   with  effusive 
flattery  Musliidi  was  told  it  would  link  his  capital  with 
the  Courts  of  Europe. 

Infatuated  with  this  daring  link,  he  even  resolved  to 


186 


THINKING  BLACK 


ape  European  ways,  and-  one  caravan  he  actually  loaded 
up  with  ivory,  the  stringent  instructions  being  to  take  it 
out  to  the  thousand-miles-off  ocean  and  receive  as  pay- 
ment only  English  earthenware  goods.  Long  months 
elapsed  before  the  ambitious  wanderers  returned,  the 
eloquent  rattle-tattle  of  the  loads  of  doomed  earthenware 
being  ominously  metallic  and  tell-tale.  When  Homer  at 
the  dawn  of  history  reminded  the  human  race  of  the 
possibility  of  a  slip  between  the  cup  and  the  lip,  he  little 
guessed  what  a  vision  of  smashed  cups  would  meet  the 
eye  of  Mushidi  as  he  gazed  on  those  broken  dreams  of 
earthenware.  Plates  and  cups,  bowls  and  saucers,  all 
broken  to  atoms,  yet  all  solemnly  taken  out  of  the  boxes 
with  exasperating  good  humour.  Each  fragment  judged 
to  be  a  thing  of  beauty  and  a  joy  for  ever.  Even  the 
smallest  chips  of  china,  with  infantine  gurgles  of  delight, 
were  strung  round  the  neck  as  ornaments,  the  handles  of 
the  cups  innovating  a  new  fashion  in  earrings.  Such  was 
Mushidi's  attempt  to  take  the  kingdom  of  civilisation  by 
force.  And  that  fragile  china  is  an  eloquent  enough 
symbol  of  the  very  civilisation  he  coveted,  which 
smashed  in  his  hands. 


CHAPTER  XI 
Vice  Versa 


"With  joyful  enthusiasm  they  [the  Britons] 
applauded  this  speech  [of  Galgacus],  in  their 
barbarian  fashion,  with  songs  and  murmurs,  and 
discordant  exclamations."  Tacitus. 

«  *  * 

"  Most  of  the  inland  inhabitants  [of  Britain]  do  not 
sow  corn,  but  live  on  milk  and  flesh,  and  are  clad  in 
skins.  All  the  Britons,  indeed,  dye  themselves  with 
woad,  which  gives  a  bluish  colour,  and  thus  they  are 
more  alarming  to  look  upon  in  battle.  They  wear 
their,  hair  long,  and  have  every  part  of  their  body 
shaved  except  their  head  and  upper  lip."  Ci^sAR. 

*  »  « 

"A  group  of  ten  and  even  twelve  have  wives  in 
common,  and  particularly  brothers  among  brothers, 
and  parents  among  their  children,  but  if  there  be 
any  issue  by  these  wives,  they  are  reputed  to  be  the 
children  of  those  to  whose  house  each  respectively 
was  first  brought  as  a  bride."  C/esar. 

•  «  • 

"  Some  people  .  .  .  may  be  Rooshans,  and  others 
may  be  Prooshans;  they  are  born  so,  and  will 
please  themselves.   Them  which  is  of  other  naturs 

thinks  different."    {Mrs.  Gamp.)  Dickens. 


1 81 


CHAPTER  XI 


Vice  Versa 

HEREIN  the  reader  discovers 
that  a  tyrant  is  a  man  who  finds 
his  happiness  in  the  misery  of  other  people. 

YET  this  kind  of  thing  goes  on  and  on,  not  the  West 
Coast  only  but  the  East,  not  the  East  only  but  the 
South,  a  constant  stream  of  these  Mushidi  caravans 
worming  their  way  out  to  all  the  Coast  settlements.  There 
they  gorge  themselves  with  so-called  civilisation ;  there, 
too,  many  are  sucked  into  the  whirlpool  of  gin-boozing, 
and  dozens  disappear  from  mortal  ken,  the  probable  prey  of 
bandits  paying  them  out  in  their  own  Mushidi  coin.  All 
along  the  East  Coast  you  can  find  a  Mushidite  who,  when 
he  first  sighted  the  Ocean,  resolved  never  to  leave  it.  And 
there  he  is  to-day,  a  prosperous  trader  or  the  like,  Arab 
skull-cap  stuck  impudently  on  his  head,  with  all  the  old 
Hodge  marks  of  his  youth  gone.  "  Absconded  "  is  the 
English  way  of  phrasing  this  runaway's  action,  but  he  had 
no  compunction  in  charging  Mushidi  100  per  cent  com- 
mission on  the  long  Ocean  journey,  thus  crying  quits. 
Did  not  the  king  claim  100  per  cent  from  the  defaulter's 
own  father? 

180 


190 


THINKING  BLACK 


At  our  end  of  the  line,  too,  this  identical  thing  is 
happening,  many  an  Arab  arriving  at  Mushidi's  capital 
never  again  to  leave  it.  Mere  packmen  as  such  often  are, 
Mushidi  politely  plunders  the  trader — with  the  man's  own 
permission,  the  bargain  being  a  dark  affair  in  which  the 
new-comer  is  presented  with  a  wife  and  fields  in  exchange 
for  the  trade  goods  of  some  defrauded  Coast  merchant. 
Never  will  Mr.  Packman  sight  the  sea  again,  and  never 
will  the  owner  of  the  goods  touch  even  a  farthing  in  the 
pound.  Thus  Mushidi  squares  accounts  with  his  commer- 
cial foes.  Does  the  seductive  Coast  rob  him  of  his  caravans  ? 
Then  he  will  retaliate  and  pleasantly  plunder  a  venture- 
some Arab  of  another  man's  money.  But  by  no  manner 
of  means  are  you  to  imagine  that  this  tit-for-tat  trickery 
is  barren  of  result.  Truth  demands  the  candid  confession 
that  this  alone  is  the  thing  an  African  can  understand. 
Lex  talionis  is  written  in  his  bones,  and  it  is  only  when 
two  rival  factions  are  united  in  a  common  bond  of  horror 
of  each  other  that  they  desist  from  crime, 

^  ^  "^f^ 

But  what  about  the  Portuguese  wife?  Poor  Queen 
Maria  de  Fonseca  !  Some  ladies  realise  that  their  fortune 
is  invested  in  their  face,  and  naturally  expect  to  draw 
interest  on  the  said  capital.  Maria  de  Fonseca,  alone  of 
all  her  colour  among  a  million  blacks,  found  her  capital 
invested  not  in  her  face  but  in  her  skin,  and  drew  cent 
per  cent  interest  accordingly.  Financial  interest  as  well 
as  social  ditto  ;  for  the  lady  who  boasted — "  My  face  is  my 
fortune,  sir  ! "  she  said — well  knew  that  her  boasted  beauty, 


VICE  VERSA 


191 


like  wealth,  is  easily  lost,  whereas  a  white  skin  is  a  capital 
that  is  at  par  in  Africa  as  long  as  life  lasts.  Her  favourite 
affectation  in  dress  these  days  is  the  wearing  of  loud  velvet 
in  voluptuous  folds  :  blue,  red,  or  yellow  velvet  one  day,  and 
brown  or  green  the  next.  Arriving  in  the  Interior,  not 
by  any  means  in  the  first  blush  of  maidenhood,  here  she 
is  frivolling  about  the  capital,  and  hating  the  whole  harem 
of  rivals.  Many  an  envenomed  glance  she  shoots  at  an 
enemy,  and  many  a  plot  she  hatches  for  the  downfall  of 
some  poor  harmless  soul.  Talking  Chiluba  with  a  fierce 
flippancy,  she  it  is  who,  Lady  Macbeth-like,  urges  Mushidi 
on  to  his  deeds  of  blood.  ^ 

{20th  December  1890.) 
One  of  the  shrewdest  revenue-raising  tricks  of  Mushidi 
is  the  institution  of  a  sort  of  Order  of  the  Garter :  the 
"  Omande  shell"  decoration  it  is  called.  This  amounts  to 
the  German  status  of  Grand  Duke :  independent  chiefs  as 
far  East  as  Ushiland  (Mirambo,  for  instance)  come  West 
here  to  do  fealty  and  receive  the  investiture.  Kevenue  is 
Mushidi's  idea  in  all  this,  and  the  fees  are  exorbitantly 
high,  slaves  paid  away  in  gangs.  And  all  this  for  the 
coveted  boon  of  the  "  Omande  shell  "  status.  To  particu- 
larise.   Apart  from  the  steady  stream  of  payments  made 

^  Aggressively  self-conscious  to  the  very  end,  her  dying  charge  to  me, 
her  "  uncle,"  was  that  her  white  skin  should  be  buried  in  a  white  coffin  ! 
Prcachfid  to,  rain  or  .shine,  for  many  a  weary  day,  she  spurned  the  Christ, 
Whom  she  thought  "a  fool  "  for  "  dying  like  a  sheep."  Only  once  to  my  ken 
she  patted  Heaven  on  the  back  approvingly  for  having  a  toilet  of  "white 
robes,"  which  she  thought  would  suit  her  complexion  !  One  day,  with  tears 
in  her  eyes,  she  broke  down  and  sobbed,  "  A  slave  I  yes  I  They  sold  me  like 
a  mere  chattel  when  I  was  a  young  girl." 


192 


THINKING  BLACK 


by  the  aspirant  from  the  very  first  day  he  sets  foot  in  the 
capital,  watch  what  happens  during  the  last  few  minutes 
of  the  ceremony.  Greedy  all  the  way  through,  the  officials 
now  become  vulpine,  and  instead  of  frankly  placing  the 
white  shell  on  his  head  and  finishing  the  business,  they 
begin  at  his  toes  and  propose  to  make  six  greedy  ascending 
pauses  before  the  crown  of  his  head  is  reached.  That  is 
to  say,  each  halt  must  pay  toll  for  the  Omande's  upward 
progress,  and  the  shell  sullenly  remains  on  the  toes  of  the 
would-be  Grand  Duke  until  he  pays  a  slave  for  its  upward 
advance.  The  "  toe  "  slave  being  paid  down  as  currency, 
the  shell  may  now  gingerly  ascend  to  the  ankle,  when 
another  halt  is  declared  and  another  slave  paid  away  to 
trickery.  The  second  toll  having  been  thus  paid,  "  ankle  " 
slave  his  name,  the  shell  now  tardily  ascends  via  the  right 
side,  and  half-way  up  to  the  knee  another  ominous  halt  is 
declared  for  another  slave  to  be  paid  away.  And  so  on, 
to  the  tune  of  six  slaves,  these  final  fees  are  paid — a  mere 
drop  this  in  the  ocean  of  greed. 

*  *  * 

To  have  a  proper  bird's-eye  picture  of  our  surroundings 
you  must  think  of  this  black  Babylon  as  a  raging  sea  of 
slavery  :  Lubans  from  the  North,  Lamba  people  from  the 
South,  Lunda  from  the  East,  Ushi  and  Vemba  from  the 
South-East.  The  flotsam  of  negro  humanity,  here  they 
are,  so  to  speak,  washed  up  on  the  shores  of  the  capital, 
all  jabbering  out  their  own  patois,  and  all  daily  taking  on 
more  local  colour  and  simulating  a  sort  of  black  cockney- 
ism.    One  of  these,  snatched  from  slavery,  was  the  lad 


VICE  VERSA 


193 


Sankuru,  and  this  is  how  it  came  about.  His  father  and 
kinsmen  were  killed  off  in  the  attack  on  their  village,  and 
the  little  son  was  put  down  at  Mushidi's  feet  in  the  same 
row  as  his  relatives'  skulls.  These  skulls  Mushidi  formally- 
put  his  foot  on,  by  way  of  "  trampling  on  the  necks  of  his 
enemies,"  but  the  boy  was  spared  and  came  to  us.  Picture 
that  little  black  boy  sitting  down  with  his  hand  on  his 
father's  skull,  like  a  young  English  schoolboy  toying  with 
a  football.  Espousing  the  cause  of  the  slave  as  we  boast 
of  doing,  Mushidi  often  twits  us  with  our  ignorance  of 
their  wild  ways. 

Alas  !  it  is  true,  they  are  a  moral  mass  of  putre- 
faction ;  but  the  negro  himself  explains  it  all  in  his 
luminous  proverb  :  "  Slave  status  causes  slave  state." 
Body  bondage  means  soul  bondage.  And  so  the  days 
pass,  these  polyglot  slaves  swarming  round  the  king  like 
gadflies.  Never  before  has  such  a  mass  weltered  in  Central 
Africa,  for  a  real  black  Babylon  is  his  insane  idea.  A  born 
linguist,  as  I  have  said,  Mushidi  day  by  day  pours  out 
cataracts  of  vituperation  on  the  bowed  heads  of  his 
pudding-stone  population.  "Son  of  a  dog!"  and  "  Son 
of  the  dust !  "  are  the  customary  compliments  he  pays 
even  to  his  own  elder  brother,  Likuku.  Vaunting  himself 
to  be  not  a  man  but  a  "  wild  beast,"  he  roars  more  than 
he  speaks,  and  I  suppose  the  Shakespearean  comment  on 
it  all  would  be  the  sarcasm  in  A  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream — "  Well  roared,  Lion !  "  This  Mushidi  roar, 
though,  is  really  the  most  hopeful  part  of  his  harnngue. 
The  real  danger  is  when  he  opens  his  mouth  wide  and 


194 


THINKING  BLACK 


then  surprises  his  listeners  with  a  shrill  falsetto  treble. 
Then  it  is  the  death-warrant  is  shrieked  :  "  Die  !  son  of 
a  dog,  son  of  the  dust."  The  mere  torrential  flow  of 
language  is  often  an  escape  safety-valve,  just  as,  on  the 
contrary,  a  silent  Mushidi  is  an  omen  of  his  "  nursing 
his  wrath  to  keep  it  warm."  No  mere  figure  of  speech 
this,  for,  night  and  day,  it  is  a  fatal  fact  that  the  fuse  of 
Mushidi's  fury  is  always  burning,  and  the  mine  may 
explode  at  any  moment.  The  Luban  idiom  for  these 
explosions  of  anger  is  the  almost  facetious  expression, 
"his  kettle  boiling  over"  [Futuma).  Yet,  doomed  to 
wrath  as  they  are,  some  of  the  slaves  are  so  precocious 
that  they  can  die  without  winking.  With  a  strange 
saturnine  humour,  they  even  crack  a  joke  within  an  inch 
of  death.  A  sort  of  lull  between  the  lava  showers  is  the 
idea.  Literally  "  in  the  jaws  of  death,"  as  an  audience 
of  Mushidi  is  called,  there  they  are,  cracking  their  joke 
even  when  the  said  jaws  are  in  the  act  of  crunching  them. 
And  why  ?  Only  the  pure  nonchalance  of  fatalism.  Some 
are  erratically  quite  lively  when  "  the  hour "  has  come  ; 
hence  their  own  negro  death-ditty  : — 

"  Oh  !  when  the  tortoise  in  the  fire  is  dying, 
'Tis  then  ho  sends  the  fire-brands  flying." 

Into  this  stubborn  slave  element,  then,  Mushidi,  with 
great,  and  it  must  be  admitted  almost  justified  severity, 
carries  death  with  derision.  He  merely  reckons  it  all  so 
much  rank  growth  that  has  to  be  cut  down.  Many  a 
time  I  plead  for  a  doomed  man's  life,  and  many  a  time 


VICE  VERSA  195 

Mushidi  retorts  that  "Slave  blood  is  bad  blood."  On 
the  surface,  certainly,  he  is  right,  for  all  who  have  worked 
among  slaves  know  that  bondage  of  body  induces  also 
bondage  of  brain.  That  is  to  say,  as  the  slave  has  been 
valued  only  as  a  current  coin  in  commerce,  he  fatalistically 
accepts  the  valuation  and  really  becomes  as  dead  and 
metallic  to  all  human  susceptibilities  as  a  literal  coin. 
Why  then  be  surprised?  Men  who  have  no  rights 
cannot  justifiably  be  complained  of  for  having  any 
wrongs.  Yet  hundreds  of  African  travellers  have  ignored 
this  negro  truism  and  slandered  the  slave  because  his 
degrading  status  has  degraded  likewise  his  state.  It  is 
ridiculous  for  a  man  to  go  and  treat  a  negro  as  though  he 
were  a  demon,  and  then  express  surprise  that  he  is  not 
an  angel.  Even  we  Missionaries  are  reaping  the  harvest 
of  this  oppression,  for  the  worst  type  of  convert  is  a 
redeemed  slave.  The  man  is  still  in  a  fog,  and  has  not 
yet  shaken  off  the  chattel  idea  even  in  the  glorious  idea 
of  the  Gospel.  Is  this  the  reason  why  Gordon  of 
Khartoum  was  betrayed  by  the  two  men  he  had  recently 
released  from  captivity  ?  Who  threw  the  bomb  that 
killed  the  Czar  Alexander?  Who,  if  not  a  liberated 
slave  ?  And  if  you  breed  slavery  in  the  bone  for  centuries, 
how  can  you  annul  it  all  by  the  cash  payment  of  an  hour  ? 
There  is  a  magic  key  even  for  this  lock,  however,  and  it 
is  found  in  the  fact  that  the  only  way  to  open  another 
man's  heart  is  by  opening  yours  to  him.  I  find  that  the 
message  that  comes  from  the  heart  will  contrive  to  reach 
other  hearts.    So  literally  is  he  a  mere  captive  coin  that, 


196 


THINKING  BLACK 


on  the  exchange  value  of-  two  sixpences  for  a  shilling, 
I  have  seen  two  boys  bartered  for  one  man.  One  such 
boy  I  have  already  referred  to,  and  only  do  so  again  to 
remind  you  that  his  name  is  "  Sikispence,"  representing 
his  exact  market  value  in  Lubaland,  one  coloured  handker- 
chief at  6d. 

{10th  February.) 
From  the  East  many  emigrants  have  trickled  in,  the 
trans-Luapula  Vemba  people  preponderating.  They  it  is 
who  have  advised  the  king  to  substitute  the  punishment 
of  "  hand-lopping  "  for  theft,  instead  of  the  death  penalty, 
and  this  has  been  the  source  of  much  uproarious  debate  at 
Court.  The  cadaverous  native  logic  is  so  elucidatory  of 
"  thinking  black "  that  I  repeat  it.  When  Mushidi 
twitted  them  with  the  absurdity  of  the  thing,  these 
Eastern  folks  argued  the  point  at  great  length,  and  with 
much  frothing  at  the  mouth.  "  We  cut  oflf  the  hand," 
said  they,  "  because  the  hand  steals."  "  I,"  laughed  Mushidi, 
"stab  them  in  the  heart,  because  the  hand  never  stole 
anything  yet,  it  is  the  heart  who  is  the  thief."  This,  too, 
is  Mushidi's  argument  against  tearing  out  the  eyes  with 
fish-hooks  as  a  punishment  for  adultery.  "  Eyes  ?  "  says 
he,  "  the  real  eyes  are  in  the  heart,  and  death  is  the  only 
true  blindness."  They  laugh,  but  Mushidi  has  both  law 
and  logic  with  him.  Clever  at  repartee  as  he  is,  the 
twinkling  old  tyrant  fairly  routed  them  with  his  "  summing 
up  "  on  this  mutilation  subject.  The  king  loquitur  :  "I 
dreamed  a  dream,  and  lo  !  I  saw  that  the  liunian  Heart 
and  the  human  Face  had  a  quarrel.    Objected  the  Heart  to 


VICE  VERSA  197 

the  Face  :  '  Why  did  you  not  groan  just  now  ?  Why  laugh  ? ' 
Retorted  the  Face  :  '  The  cheeks  only  do  what  the  Heart 
commands.'  Yea,  further,  I  dreamed  a  dream,  and  lo, 
I,  Mushidi,  heard  a  loud  racking  cough,  most  painful  to 
the  cougher.  Said  the  Heart  to  the  cough  :  '  Oh,  you  bad, 
you  cruel  cough,  to  rack  me  so  with  your  coughing.' 
Said  the  cough  to  the  Heart :  '  Bad  and  cruel  ?  How  can 
I  be  bad,  coming  up  as  I  do  from  the  depths  of  such  a  good 
Heart  as  you  ? '  " 

Not  these  Vemba  folks  only  but  many  another  droll 
emigrant  tried  to  trek  in  towards  Bunkeya  to  seek  his 
fortune.  For  when  this  Mushidi  leapt  into  the  light  of 
history  in  the  Interior,  the  good  news  spread,  and  many 
a  young  man  out  East,  catching  the  spirit  of  the  thing, 
resolved  to  go  West  and  win  to  wealth  and  lands  of  his 
own.  But  Mushidi,  so  to  speak,  like  the  dog  he  was, 
snarled,  stuck  to  his  bone  and  showed  his  malevolent 
teeth.  He  would  none  of  them.  Scared  off  some  of  the 
adventurers  would  not  be,  however,  and  to  this  day  in 
the  North,  Lunungwa,  ]Rwena,  Kaseva,  are  still  in  posses- 
sion of  lands  won  by  their  own  prowess.  Lands,  mark 
you,  that  gracefully  avoid  Mushidi's  boundary  on  the 
Lualaba  East. 

One  famous  failure  there  was,  however,  and  he  resolved 
to  go  down  to  history  as  "  a  bad  'un  " — Katigile  his  name. 
Ostensibly  a  copper  trader  like  all  the  Yeke  band,  he  was 
only  one  more  pirate  ship  out  on  the  Central  African 
ocean  of  commerce.  But  K.,  dismally  defeated  as  he  was, 
went  away  l)ack  East  with  hate  in  his  heart  and  a  soul 


198 


THINKING  BLACK 


baked  hard  in  the  fire  of  adversity.  If  he  could  not  die 
famous  he  would  end  infamous,  so  he  planned  a  devilish 
deed.  Yonder  far  East,  and  tucked  away  in  between  the 
Wanyamwezi  Hills,  was  his  natal  village,  where  the  pest  of 
chigoes  had  never  yet  come ;  well,  here  is  his  chance : 
why  not  import  a  plague  and  die  infamous  ?  This  would 
ease  his  endless  pressure  of  penury,  this,  the  mad  idea 
that  his  name,  as  a  grey  monument  in  history,  would  ever 
be  linked  with  the  introduction  of  such  a  deadly  plague. 
So  he  dared  the  deed  and  cursed  his  native  land.  The 
collecting  of  "  seed  "  chigoes  was  too  easy  not  to  succeed, 
and  he  safely  let  them  loose  on  their  bad  business  of  hate. 
Years  after,  when  the  townsfolk  out  East  fought  in  a  frenzy 
of  determination  to  eradicate  that  chigoe  pest,  many  a 
curse  was  linked  with  Katigile's  name.  Yet  some  people 
say  the  Devil  has  no  Missionaries,  and  no  propaganda ! 
The  heart  of  man  never  showed  more  truly  the  bad  stuflf 
of  which  it  is  made  than  just  here  in  this  baneful  deed. 
Even  Katigile  himself  died  with  his  toes  eaten  by  chigoes, 
cursed  with  his  own  cruel  curse. 

*  *  * 

So  the  days  drag  past,  seemingly  a  mere  hyphen  and 
connecting  link.  Mushidi  holds  on  to  us,  and  we  hold  on 
to  the  country.  "  If  you  are  tied  in  ropes,"  says  the 
proverb,  "  the  more  you  tug  the  tighter  the  knots  become," 
so  even  here  we  learn  to  bide  God's  time.  (Is  it  not  in 
the  Captivity  Epistles  that  Paul  writes  of  the  Church's 
heavenly  calUng  ?  Seated  in  a  dark  Roman  prison,  was 
it  not  just  then  he  claimed  to  be  seated  in  the  heavenlies  ?) 


VICE  VERSA 


199 


The  sorest  thorn  in  our  side  these  days  is  the  resident 
Arabs  at  the  capital.  They  make  a  dead  set  against  us, 
buttering  up  "  The  Sultan  "  for  hours  and  plotting  darkly. 
Every  time  we  pass  their  camp  going  on  to  Mushidi's  they 
curse  Christ  with  bitter  blasphemy.  The  revengeful  relish 
in  their  invectives  is  the  darkest  smudge  in  all  our  exper- 
ience ;  verily,  the  poison  of  asps  is  under  their  tongue. 
Yet  they  pray  for  hours  and  by  clockwork  from  the 
highest  to  the  lowest — pray  to  God  and  curse  His  Anointed. 
No  wonder  the  arm-chair  Englishman  misunderstands  it 
all,  "  On  one  occasion,"  says  Augustus  Hare,  "  I  was 
present  at  a  garden  party  given  by  Lady  Salisbury  in 
honour  of  the  Sultan  of  Zanzibar.  In  the  middle  of  it 
the  Sultan  came  up  to  the  hostess  and  said,  '  Now,  please, 
it  is  time  for  me  to  say  my  prayers.  I  should  like  to  go 
to  your  room  and  be  alone  for  ten  minutes.  I  always  do 
this  four  times  a  day.'  The  Archbishop  of  Dublin  was 
so  delighted  with  this,  that  on  being  presented  to  the 
Sultan  he  said,  *  I  am  glad  to  have  the  honour  of  being 
presented  to  a  man  who  has  made  a  promise  and 
kept  it.'"  But  contrast  the  same  sort  of  Zanzibar 
Arab  here  with  us  in  the  African  bush,  not  in  an 
English  flower  garden.  Kuomha  Muungu  is  the  great 
Arab  phrase,  "  praying  to  God,"  but  locally  this  formula 
has  become  the  term  for  murder,  Tu  na  hicenda 
kuomha  Muungu  being  the  double  equivalent  for  "  Let 
us  be  off  to  prayers,"  or  (save  the  mark)  "  Let  us  be 
off  to  kill."  It  does  not  often  happen  that  staid  old 
English  can  hit  off  such  gruesome  drolleries,  but  you  have 


0 


200  THINKING  BLACK 

the  identical  idea  when  you  misspell  "  pray  "  as  "  prey  " — 
these  devout  Arabs  do  nothing  but  prey.  Theirs  it  is,  at 
any  rate,  to  explain  why  Kuomba  Muungu  doubly  denotes 
prayer  and  plunder,  worship  and  war — only  another  proof 
this,  that  we  are  the  poles  asunder. 

When  the  thermometer  goes  up  the  barometer  gener- 
ally goes  down.  Even  so  Mr.  Arab  and  Mr.  Missionary  : 
your  A  is  his  Z ;  your  beginning,  his  end — literally  so, 
I  mean,  for  the  whole  ABC  of  this  Arab  problem  is 
only  a  mere  matter  of  his  own  actual  Arabic  ABC. 
There,  in  that  Semitic  alphabet  of  his,  beginning  like 
Hebrew  at  the  right  and  working  across  to  the  left  side 
of  the  paper,  there,  I  say,  you  have  the  whole  typical 
story  of  Arab  and  Englishman.  Always  missing  each 
other  and  never  meeting,  we  work  the  page  of  life  from 
left  to  right,  and  he  glories  in  doing  the  diametric 
opposite.  Muruturutu  laughed  at  me  in  disdainful  Board 
School  fashion  for  reading  out  the  Bible  from  left  to 
right :  it  obviously  offended  his  academical  susceptibilities 
as  much  as  seeing  a  native  pretending  to  read  a  book 
upside  down.  "  The  blind  man  has  bought  a  looking- 
glass  ! "  is  their  high-flown  hint  that  all  such  pretence  of 
reading  is  of  no  value.  Can  you  eat  your  dinner  standing 
on  your  head  ?  The  which  is  a  parable,  I  repeat,  for  the 
difference  between  us  is  one  of  standpoint,  but  stand- 
points so  mutually  antagonistic  that  blood  would  flow  in 
rivers,  as  in  the  old  days  of  the  Saracen  conquest,  but  for 
the  English  preponderance  in  quick-firers.  The  Arab 
himself  sees  worlds  of  meaning  in  this  sharp  contrast  of 


VICE  VERSA 


201 


the  two  adverse  races  beginning  to  write  at  the  opposite 
sides  of  a  sheet  of  paper,  and  certain  it  is,  that  the  gulf 
cutting  off  the  Arab  from  the  European  is  "as  far  as  the 
East  is  from  the  West." 

Take  the  Gospel.    "  Believe  or  die,"  says  he — "  Believe 
and  live,"  say  we.    Take  polygamy.    We  proclaim  Christ 
born  of  a  woman,  and  the  dignity  of  her  sex :  last  at  the 
cross,  first  at  the  tomb — they  glory  in  polygamy  as  the 
only  true  code  of  marital  morals.    We  crusade  against 
the  bondage  of  the  slave — they  are  the  notorious  slavers 
of  Central  Africa.    We  quote  the  Golden  Rule,  "  Do  unto 
others,"  etc.,  as  the  Christ's  incipient  abolition  of  slavery 
— they  retort  with  the  Devil's  golden  rule  of  £  s.  d. 
We  prove  that  to  barter  human  beings  is  to  deny  that 
man  was  made   in   the  image  of  God  —  they  quote 
Mohammed  who  enjoins  the  selling  of  a  slave.  Now 
precisely  as  with  this  sharp  cleavage  of  slavery,  so  too 
with  much  more.    Take  the  Arab  doctrine  of  force,  as 
against  the  Christian  doctrine  of  persuasion  :  here  you 
have  the  most  thrilling  contrast  of  all.    We  point  to 
Christ  inculcating  a  crusade  of  love  and  peace  in  His 
very  last  commandment :  "Go  ye  into  all  the  world." 
They  point  to  Mohammed  among  his  last  acts  planning 
a  bloody  war  of  extermination. 

(Later.) 

One  incident  I  recall,  a  tragedy  that  burnt  on  my 
mind  indelibly  this  Arab  versus  Englisliman  contrast. 
It  was  after  the  smash-up.  A  great  Arab,  Kasokota  his 
nom  de  guerre,  is  condemned  to  death  by  court  martial 


202 


THINKING  BLACK 


— crime,  the  usual  charge  of  high  treason.  The  Belgian 
Commandant  quaintly  notifies  me,  as  Missionary,  that  up 
to  twelve  noon  I  can  see  to  the  Arab's  soul,  and  after 
that,  by  the  clock,  he  will  deal  with  his  body.  So  there, 
sitting  under  the  acacia  tree,  "  this  side  of  the  portal,"  we 
talk  for  eternity.  Not  many  minutes  now,  and  his 
despairing,  dying  cry  will  go  ringing  up  to  God.  But  I 
soon  discover  that  the  convict  chain  round  his  neck  is 
only  a  type  of  that  other  Koran  chain  binding  this 
dignified  Arab,  soul  and  body.  Rubbing  shoulders  as 
we  are,  the  old  gulf  of  East  and  West  yawns  between  us 
a  thousand  miles.  At  the  outset,  he  clutches  at  me  as  a 
drowning  man  will  clutch  at  anything,  and  beseeches  me 
to  plead  for  his  life.  Urges  eloquently,  that  here  he  is 
"  dying  like  a  sheep,"  and  not  a  member  of  the  Court 
knew  one  word  of  his  language.  With  alacrity  and  in 
spite  of  official  umbrage,  once,  twice,  thrice  I  go  to  the 
Commandant  with  the  doomed  Arab's  plea,  only  to  be  told 
with  a  civil  stifiness  that  my  business  is  to  save  him  from 
his  eternal  doom.  When,  however,  I  get  back  to  the 
prisoner  under  the  acacia  and  tell  him  how  sadly  sealed 
is  his  fate,  the  door  of  Mr.  Arab's  heart  slams  on  my 
Gospel.  He  starts  to  preach  to  me,  if  you  please. 
Repentant  ?  No.  He  dies  like  Lord  Mohammed,  wishing 
for  bloody  war.  Here  is  a  man  quite  certain  that  we 
English  never  can  perform  the  Arab  acrobatic  feat  of 
crossing  the  narrow  bridge  of  Sirat  into  Paradise.  This 
bridge  of  vast  length,  as  narrow  as  a  hair,  the  edge  thereof 
as  sharp  as  a  scimitar,  spans  the  abyss  of  hell,  but  all 


I 


VICE  VERSA 


203 


impenitent  Englishmen  will  fall  headlong  before  a  puflF  of 
wind  sent  by  Allah.  There,  in  that  one  Blondin  boast  of 
the  Arab  acrobats,  you  have  the  volume  of  their  self- 
righteous  ideas:  to  the  right,  Jehennam,  or  hell;  to  the 
left,  Jenneh,  or  Paradise ;  and  every  mortal  must  walk  the 
razor-edged  Sirat  barefoot,  eternal  destiny  the  issue  of 
this  religious  tight-rope  venture.  The  Gospel  of  the  Christ 
Who  saves  His  own  murderers  and  makes  a  Paul  out  of 
a  Saul,  His  diamonds  out  of  soot,  is  nonsense  to  them. 
What  Mr.  Arab  preaches  is  a  message  full  of  all  the  old 
elemental  passions  of  the  race  :  an  eye-for-eye,  tooth-for- 
tooth  recrimination.  Two  hours  later,  I  saw  that  proud 
Arab's  dripping,  newly  washed  garments  hanging  out 
to  dry,  each  doleful  drip  telling  the  sinister  tale  that 
the  executioner  had  claimed  them  as  his  fee  for  the  dark 
deed  accomplished.  Drip !  drip !  from  the  dead  man's 
clothes  came  the  echo  of  their  own  awful  Arab  warning  : 
"  There  are  no  fans  in  hell"  He  lived  hard,  worked 
hard,  died  hard,  and  then  how  hard  to  go  to  hell  after 
all! 

{\2th  March.) 
These  roaming  Arabs  bring  in  rumours  of  far-off 
Missionaries,  which  reminds  me  that  this  chronicle  is  not 
an  autobiography,  and  my  narrative  has  run  on  too  much 
in  the  "  nasty  nominative."  Let  us  think  of  others  now. 
Farthest  in  geographically  as  we  are,  it  is  also  our  privi- 
lege to  be  farthest  in  ecclesiastically — sort  of  Scouts 
of  the  Church  of  God,  if  you  please.  Take  our  bearings. 
In  1890  the  Missionary  Map  runs  thus:  Out  in  the  Far 


204 


THINKING  BLACK 


West,  our  nearest  ^  ecclesiastical  neighbours  in  the  Garen- 
ganze  are  those  splendid  American  Board  men,  distant 
roughly  800  miles  in  Bihe.     Often  when  lonely,  the 
very  thought  of  noble  Currie  trimming  God's  lamp  at 
Chisamba  comes  in  on  us  like  a  whiff  of  ozone  from 
the  far  Atlantic.     Then,  turning  South,  our  nearest 
Christian  neighbour  is  the  sainted  Coillard  far  down 
in  the  Barotse  Valley,  600  miles  away.    Looking  North 
towards  the  Equator,  and  a  good  thousand  miles  off,  are 
the  graves  of  the  Combers  on  the  Congo.    Nearer  still, 
our  good  friends  on  Tanganyika  Plateau,  the  L.M.S.  of 
historic  renown  :  my  beloved  friend  John  May  was  one 
of  their  noble  men.    But  the  best  wine  comes  last,  and 
the  crowning  boon  of  all  is  Livingstonia  on  the  far  East- 
ern skyline.    Four  hundred  miles  distant,  there  you  have 
"the  Bishop  of  Central  Africa,"  Dr.  Robert  Laws.  Inter- 
denominational in  the  best  sense,  this  good  man's  sunny, 
hospitable  heart  has  a  place  for  all  of  us,  and  the  only 
furlough  I  ever  had  was  a  happy  year's  sojourn  out  East 
at  Livingstonia.     Thus,  having  viewed  the  place  in  its 
deep  penetralia,  I  know  whereof  I  affirm  :  there  you  learn 
how  true  it  is  that  the  seemingly  cold  Scotch  are  only 
icebergs  with  volcanoes  underneath  ;  thaw  the  northern 
ice  and  you  get  to  the  Scottish  fire.   Dr.  Laws  it  was,  who 
cut  into  the  lazy  lotus  life  of  the  Nyassaland  negro,  and 
made  him  honour  hard  work.    A  glance  at  a  Livingstonia 
Report  reveals  a  sturdy  type  of  service  that  taboos  a  mere 
mist  of  line  words,  and  clings  to  sane  statistics.  The 

^  See  p.  138,  ante. 


VICE  VERSA 


205 


Industrial  Department,  particularly,  turns  out  a  robust 
type  of  pick-and-shovel  Christian,  and  this  healthy  thing 
has  no  doubt  saved  the  land  from  a  great  reactionary 
apostasy.  Thanks  to  Livingstonia,  the  Garenganze  got 
its  New  Testament^  and  teachers,  and  centred  in  Dr.  Laws' 
great  enterprise  are  the  hopes  of  wide  Central  Africa. 
In  a  quaint  old  map  of  Africa,  published  in  the  guess- 
work days  of  1815,  the  only  brilliant  bit  of  work  therein 
was  a  true  prophecy  of  Livingstonia.  After  creeping 
cautiously  round  the  African  coast-line,  the  daring  carto- 
graphist  put  down  his  prophetic  pen  near  Lake  Nyassa,  or 
"  Maravi  "  as  it  was  then  called,  and  wrote  :  "  Mountains 
of  Lupata,  or  the  8pine  of  the  World."  Now,  all  this 
was  delightful,  because  authentic  prophecy,  for  in  the 
long-subsequent  Livingstonia  that  appeared  in  those 
very  latitudes,  the  word  "  backbone "  is  the  keynote 
of  it  all. 

*  Through  the  instrumentality  of  Dr.  Laws,  our  Luban  translation  of  the 
New  Testament  was  published  by  the  National  Bible  Society  of  Scotland. 


CHAPTER  XII 
Shut  In,  but  Almost  Out 


"On  that  hard  Pagan  world  disgust 
And  secret  loathing  fell : 
Deep  weariness  and  sated  lust 
Made  human  life  a  hell." 

»  •  « 

"  Can  the  Ethiopian  change  his  skin  or  the  leopard 

his  spots?"  Jeremiah. 
»  «  « 

"Ye  must  be  born  again."  John. 
«  «  « 

"The  sun  can  mirror  his  glorious  face 
In  the  dewdrop  on  the  sod ; 
And  the  humblest  negro  heart  reflect 
The  Hfe  and  love  of  God." 


CHAPTER  XII 


Shut  in,  but  Almost  Out 

T  N  which  the  reader ^  being  removed 
one  thousand  miles  from  his  nearest 
shop,  learns  lijes  greatest  lesson,  that  the 
Infinite  God  is  the  God  of  the  Infinitesimal, 

HERE  it  is,  on  the  spurs  of  the  Bunkeya  Hills,  Mr. 
Arnot  first  built  his  Mission  hut-house,  a  solid 
but  not  too  ambitious  structure.  And  here  too 
we  salute  those  of  "  our  own  company,"  Messrs.  Swan  and 
Faulknor.  Cut  ofi"  from  the  outside  world  as  they  are, 
no  doubt  "  the  banner  over  them  is  love "  ;  but  so,  too, 
there  is  sadly  waving  over  their  little  far-away  cabin 
the  yellow  flag  of  quarantine.  Faulknor,  a  shining  saint, 
has  found  Africa  to  be  one  long  hospital  of  pain.  Two 
men  all  alone  in  the  lonely  Interior  seem  a  poor,  in- 
adequate sort  of  testimony,  yet  so  normally  necessary 
is  it  to  be  mighty  in  word  and  deed  that  the  sick  man 
prayed  while  the  strong  man  preached,  and  thus  he  also 
serves  who  only  stands  and  waits.  Certainly  in  the 
mouth  of  two  witnesses,  word  and  deed,  every  word  was 
established,  for  while  able  Mr.  Swan  preached  Calvary  his 
good  friend  Faulknor  carried  the  cross  of  pain.  Bed- 

109 


210 


THINKING  BLACK 


ridden  though  he  was  for  many  a  day,  he  soon  found  that 
when  God  permits  you  to  take  a  back  seat  you  can  have 
a  very  good  time.  Besides,  as  the  average  African  can 
look  through  your  body  like  glass,  Faulknor's  "  living 
epistle"  was  eloquent  the  whole  day  long,  and  ever 
answering  the  challenge  of  the  relentless  negro  stare.  In 
Africa  our  faces  are  our  coats  of  arms.  For  all  of  us  the 
great  danger  in  African  mission  work  is,  that  often  our 
preacher's  bow  is  not  so  tightly  strung  in  private  as  in 
public  life,  and  the  native  puzzles  his  head  over  this.  But 
there  was  many  a  song  of  triumph  even  under  that 
drooping  yellow  flag  of  quarantine,  and  Richter  perfectly 
describes  the  gains  this  good  Canadian  got  out  of  his 
pains.  The  burden  of  Faulknor's  sufiering  may  have 
only  looked  to  outsiders  like  a  tombstone  hung  round  his 
neck,  whereas  in  reality  it  was  only  a  weight  necessary  to 
keep  down  the  diver  while  he  was  collecting  pearls.  God 
in  all  lands  must  cross  His  Church  before  He  can  crown  it, 
and  it  is  the  late  George  Miiller  of  Bristol  who  tells  of  one 
of  the  pearls  brought  up  from  these  depths  of  suffering. 
One  day  his  vast  enterprise  on  the  Ashley  Downs  was  down 
to  zero  for  the  orphans'  "  daily  bread,"  but  the  dinner-bell 
rang  in  heaven  and  a  much-needed  gift  arrived.  Where 
did  it  come  from  ?  Mr.  Miiller  says  a  sick  missionary  from 
the  wilds  of  Africa  was  the  donor — this  man  who  had  been 
shut  up  in  the  Interior,  grievously,  almost  permanently, 
disabled.  Yet  so  grateful  was  this  bodily  wreck  for  a  safe 
return  to  England  that  he  struck  his  slender  balance  of 
resources,  and  poured  it  all  at  his  Master's  feet. 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  211 

Shunted  ojBf  thus  into  a  sort  of  siding,  the  tide  of  roaring 
life  sweeps  past  us  down  in  the  valley  of  the  Capital,  an 
all-day  stream  of  visitors  trickling  in  to  us  among  the  rocks. 
Arriving,  as  we  do,  almost  empty-handed,  Mushidi  despises 
us  for  our  own  impecuniosity.  In  harsh  and  unembellished 
terms  he  insists  that  we  are  no  "  whites  "  at  all,^ 

Rooming,  as  we  utter  strangers  to  each  other  do,  in 
mud  African  houses,  then,  oh  !  then  is  love's  crucible,  for 
often  incipient  fever  makes  a  good  man  carp  at  rough  fare 
— a  good  man,  that  is  to  say,  with  a  bad  body.  How 
many  people  in  England  quote  the  text  about  brethren 
"  dwelling  in  unity "  who  only  see  them  in  the  busy 
street,  or  at  a  week-end  meeting  ?  Let  them  come  out  to 
Africa  and  learn  the  trials  (and  triumphs)  of  so  literally 
dwelling  in  unity  in  a  hot  "  station."  Never  out  of  each 
other's  sight.  In  moderation  I  am  bold  to  suspect  my 
friend  might  find  me  passably  or  even  mildly  entertaining, 
but  in  such  frequent  and  overwhelming  doses  one  must 
pall  on  one's  poor  brother.  The  trouble  is,  that  one  is 
tempted  far  too  often  to  speak  one's  mind,  forgetful  of 
the  fact  that  in  speaking  your  mind  you  must  also  mind 
how  you  speak.  Even  the  most  genial  of  souls  soon 
surprises  himself  more  than  his  friend  by  a  snap  of  irrita- 
tion quite  foreign  to  his  temperament.  This  is  Africa  at 
its  old  trick  of  fastening  on  its  victim,  and  tightening  the 
tropical  grip  on  his  soul. 

•  So,  too,  Dr.  Moloney  ;  in  his  book  he  pities  us  and  cannot  "help  think- 
ing that  a  profound  mistake  was  committed  when  the  Missionaries  were 
dispatched  into  this  barbarous  country  hundreds  of  miles  from  a  European 
post." 


212 


THINKING  BLACK 


Memo,  for  Missionaries  :  The  closer  any  two  bodies  act 
together,  the  more  oil  they  need.  Even  when  Mr.  A.  is 
a  mere  echo  of  Mr.  B.,  the  result  is  that  Mr.  B.  deplores 
his  own  echo  and  refuses  to  father  it.  A  well-balanced 
Mission  is  like  a  well-balanced  world  :  it  is  only  kept  right 
by  two  tendencies  working  in  opposite  directions — one 
throwing  out  and  the  other  pulling  in.  Brother  Centri- 
fugal is  only  right  as  he  is  seconded  by  Brother  Centri- 
petal, and  either  dare  not  lack  the  other.  I  know  two 
good  men  who  had  a  rare  royal  time  together  for  years, 
yet  Brother  A.'s  favourite  tune  was,  "  In  the  sweet  by  and 
by,"  and  Brother  B.'s,  "In  the  sweet  Now  and  Now." 
When  Brother  A.  saw  the  rain,  he  would  unerringly 
surmise,  "This  will  make  mud,"  then  Brother  B.  would 
chime  in,  "  This  will  lay  the  dust."  Saith  Brother  A.,  "  I 
am  sorry  it  is  no  better."  Quoth  Brother  B.,  "  I'm  glad  it 
is  no  worse."  Yet  these  two  saints  (oh  yes)  get  along 
happily  together,  because  soaked  deep  into  their  souls  was 
the  divine  doctrine  that  God's  Church  is  a  complete  unity 
of  various  temperaments  and  methods.  What  kind  of 
music  would  you  have  without  sharps  and  flats  ?  The 
wheels  of  a  watch,  remember,  move  contrary  to  each  other, 
and  thereby  alone  can  you  get  a  good  time-keeper. 

Yet  show  I  unto  you  a  more  excellent  way.  Better, 
better  far  the  Missionary  (dear,  dead-and-gone  Cobbe,  for 
instance)  who  had  a  happy  soul  balanced  in  equal  ratio 
by  the  same  two  laws  that  make  the  planet  earth  such 
a  well-balanced  sphere,  the  one  pulling  him  into  God's 
presence,  the  other  driving  him  out  in  service. 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  213 

Remember,  as  the  days  pass,  our  Western  road  is 
blocked  and  no  supplies  can  cross  the  Lualaba,  but  the 
malefactors  who  have  done  it  all  are  really  benefactors. 
Well  spake  Hudson  Taylor,  when  he  affectionately  bade 
us  farewell,  "  The  Devil  can  wall  you  round,  but  he 
cannot  roof  you  in."  We  always  can  reckon  on  the 
bit  of  blue  overhead.  What  to  outsiders  may  seem  the 
hateful  exigencies  of  poverty,  is  to  us  merely  God  remov- 
ing the  clogging  weights  to  make  good  our  motto  :  The 
maximum  of  power  with  the  minimum  of  machinery. 
Granted,  I  say,  many  solid  considerations  against  this 
idea  of  our  meagre  Missionary  pioneer  outfit,  but  granted 
also  many  obvious  gains  for  all  our  pains.  Mr.  Lane  on 
leaving  me  here  in  the  Interior  after  some  months  of  the 
bread  of  affliction,  wrote  of  all  his  privations :  "  Trying 
as  things  were,  I  would  not  have  forgone  that  blessed 
season  of  trial  for  all  the  luxuries  of  civilisation.  As  I 
take  a  backward  look  my  heart  rejoices,  and  I  am 
increasingly  realising  the  blessedness  of  having  come  forth 
looking  to  the  Lord  alone  for  my  supplies."  Paul  fondly 
boasted  of  his  "  manner  of  entering  in  "  among  them,  and 
in  some  severe  sense  your  initial  choice  of  the  manner  of 
entering  in  among  an  African  tribe  will  wholly  determine 
your  subsequent  line  of  action.  The  effervescent  negro 
will  easily  fall  down  and  worship  a  caravan  that  parades 
as  much  of  the  Lord  Mayor's  Show  element  about  it  as 
possible.  What  he  wants  is  something  violently  spec- 
tacular and  "striking,"  as  he  names  his  own  word  for 
"glory."    Thus  out  of  sheer  desire  for  your  African's 


214 


THINKING  BLACK 


welfare,  you  must  needs  strip  yourself  of  impedimenta  in 
order  to  outwit  the  cupidity  of  the  black  man. 

The  highest  compliment  I  have  been  paid  in  my  bush 
African  wanderings  was  when  a  snob  chief  gave  me 
a  dole  of  forty  yards  of  calico  as  a  pitying  alms,  because 
I  was  "  out  at  the  elbows."  Of  course  I  have  since  paid 
him  his  own  with  usury,  but  the  link  binding  us  in 
friendship  is  all  the  more  real  because  the  initial  bounty 
was  on  his  part.  There  is  nothing  to  be  ashamed  of 
in  poverty  except  being  ashamed  of  it.  The  best  pair 
of  boots  I  had  for  many  a  day  were  a  Portuguese 
convict's,  bought  from  a  negro.  So,  too,  with  a  mys- 
terious suit  of  clothes  which  I  rescued  from  a  slaver — 
the  fit  was  faultless.  Far  too  faultless,  for  it  clung  to 
me  as  tight  as  a  wall-paper.  So,  too,  with  much  more. 
This  famine  and  fever  land  in  a  special  and  extraordinary 
way  clears  the  field  for  a  full  display  of  the  power  of 
His  might,  for  man  is  often  brought  low  with  all  his 
shrewd  contrivances,  and  only  God  can  avail.  The  last 
and  nearest  commercial  banking-house  in  the  world  was 
just  one  thousand  miles  distant  on  the  seashore.  Your 
deposit  account  might  be  ad  libitum,  but  your  powers 
of  cashing  same  in  the  long  grass  were  at  zero.  Certainly 
the  pampered  civilisation  of  Great  Britain  is  all  on  the 
side  of  unbelief,  for  everything  is  too  cut-and-dried, 
and  runs  in  a  fixed  groove,  comes  as  a  matter  of  course, 
not  as  a  wonder.  Here,  in  the  bush,  it  is  delightful 
again  and  again  to  watch  how  God  hears  you  scrape 
the  bottom  of  the  meal-barrel.    Again  and  again,  with 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  215 

"  dramatic  neatness  of  Divine  method,"  the  dinner-bell  has 
gone  in  Heaven  for  my  "surprise  meal." 

It  was  hinted  to-day  quite  blandly  that  we  must 
be  runaways  rom  justice.  We  are  nobodies  :  where  are 
our  belongings  ?  Yet  here  again  we  have  gains  for  pains.* 
After  all,  we  dare  not  ignore  the  fact  that  the  mere 
temporalities  of  the  Missionary,  with  his  creaking  boots, 
do  bulk  far  too  largely  in  the  greedy  gaze  of  our  bush 
negro.  A  Missionary  without  God — not  without  supplies 
— is  like  a  rabbit  against  the  Russian  Empire.  Oh,  the 
abysmal  and  abominable  chasm  between  Mr.  White  and 
Mr.  Black !  The  mediocre  Englishman  with  his  mass  of 
belongings  is,  by  the  negro,  literally  and  repellently 
called  Leza  Mukulu  ("0  great  God").  The  same  thing 
this,  as  when  some  raw  natives  looking  over  a  Mission 
fence  at  a  simple  wattle-and-daub  house  said,  "  Ye  are 
the  people  of  God  :  look  at  the  size  of  your  houses." 

Even  our  endless  praising  of  God  before  the  raw 
native  is  misunderstood,  and  certainly  twice  I  have 
heard  a  negro  grunt,  "  Yes,  well  you  might  praise  God, 
He  has  been  good  to  you."  But  aback  of  all  this, 
there  is  a  blacker  subtlety  still,  I  mean  the  endless 
negro  suspicion  that  God  is  an  Englishman  :  the  bare- 
footed Christ  of  rocky  roads  in  Palestine  they  cannot 
conceive.  They  are  sure  that  we  are  the  spoilt  and 
petted  children  of  a  pampered  civilisation,  and  as  they 

1  Dr.  Moloney's  statement  that  not  only  did  Mushidi  call  us  "  white 
slaves,"  but  that  he  also  despoiled  us  of  our  goods,  errs  in  the  important 
particular  that  we  bad  no  goods  to  despoil. 


216  THINKING  BLACK 

look  at  the  vault  of  the  sky  curving  down  to  meet  the 
horizon  in  the  direction  of  Europe,  they  actually  believe 
that  Heaven  meets  earth  among  the  white  men.  No 
wonder  Malemba  once  interrupted  a  sermon  of  mine 
on  the  murder  of  Christ  at  Golgotha  with  the  stinging 
retort:  "Ay,  you  white  men  wxre  a  bad  lot  to  go 
away  and  kill  The  Best  One  like  that :  we  blacks  only 
kill  criminals."  "And  then,"  said  he,  "far  from  being 
ashamed  of  what  you  have  done,  you  come  across  the 
seas  to  tell  us  you  did  it."  That  this  idea  is  deeply 
embedded  in  the  negro  mind  can  be  proved  by  re- 
membering that  the  revolting  blacks  of  San  Domingo 
shouted  out  the  same  dread  war-cry.  Devastating  the 
plantations  with  murder  and  fire  and  led  by  a  fanatic, 
their  bloodthirsty  cries  rent  the  air,  "  The  whites  killed 
the  Christ,  let  us  slay  all  whites  ! "  How  different  the 
fawning  attitude  of  a  sleek,  well-fed  "Mission"  native 
who  listens  to  even  a  corrosive  rebuke  with  a  beaming 
smile  !  The  fact  is,  these  obsequious,  beaming  blacks 
who  make  an  avenue  for  you  to  pass  through  into  their 
country,  propose  to  treat  the  Missionary  precisely  as  you 
in  England  treat  the  postman — that  is  to  say,  they  acclaim 
him  not  for  what  he  is  in  himself,  but  for  what  he 
brings.  And  this  would  be  delightfully  all  right  pro- 
vided the  negro  welcomed  us  as  a  letter  postman — God's 
postman  bringing  God's  letter.  Alas  !  he  tliinks  we  are 
parcels  postmen,  and  any  of  the  humblest  ameliorations 
of  civilisation  about  us  develop  in  the  negro  that  avarice 
known  locally  as  "  the  big  eye."    Thus,  even  when  we 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  217 

have  drained  our  last  drop  of  tea,  and  all  the  meaner 
facilities  of  life  have  departed  from  our  mud  hut,  we  still 
see  Divine  intent  in  it  all.  For  God  had  only  removed 
the  gilt  from  the  gingerbread  of  our  "  white  "  prestige  in 
order  to  proclaim  the  poverty  of  the  Cross.  And  this 
mollified  all  our  soreness.  Christ's  cause  in  Africa  is  too 
often  wounded  in  the  house  of  its  friends,  but  never  so 
grievously  and  gratuitously  as  when  a  Missionary  of  the 
Cross  beats  easily  all  his  fellow-Europeans  in  this  matter 
of  first-class  get  up.  The  best  houses,  best  furniture, 
best  eating,  all  at  "  The  Mission." 

Out  towards  the  Atlantic  Ocean  our  nearest  shop  is 
just  one  thousand  miles  ofi". 

One  sacred  calendar  of  mine  contains  the  following 
categoric  and  genuine  gifts,  "  nick  of  time  "  succour  we 
call  this  : — 

One  woman — 35  baskets  of  flour. 

Another — 25  baskets  of  flour,  4  baskets  of  green 
vegetables. 

Another — 22  baskets  of  green  vegetables,  i.e.  green 

corn,  cucumbers,  pumpkins,  etc. 
Another — 15  baskets  of  flour,  etc. 
Fifteen  others  might  be  added  with  totals  of  ten,  nine, 
eight,  six  and  less  baskets  of  flour,  corn,  etc. 

"His  methods  are  sublime, 
Ilis  ways  supremely  kind  ; 
God  never  is  before  His  time. 
And  never  is  behind." 

And  where  is  the  man  longing  for  apostolic  pre- 


218 


THINKING  BLACK 


cedents  who  would  exchange  these  glad  trials  of  faith 
for  a  king's  ransom  ?  Weary  in  the  wilderness  trail,  you 
listen,  and  lo  there  is  the  bubbling  brook  by  the  way, 
and  drinking  you  do  lift  the  head.  These  are  mercies 
from  God's  right  hand.  The  provocative  policy  of  our 
entering  Africa  loaded  up  with  impedimenta  does  not  give 
the  raw  African  a  chance  really  to  help  the  Missionary : 
he  cannot  conceive  of  such  a  rich  Missionary  being 
honestly  pinched.  Give  him  the  chance  and  you  will 
marvel :  it  will  be  the  story  of  Ebed-melech  the  black 
man  over  again.  His  own  colour  had  abandoned 
Jeremiah,  and  there  you  have  the  Hebrew  prophet  down 
a  hole,  no  water  and  sunk  in  the  mire.  The  accurate 
analogy  this  of  an  African  Missionary  cut  off  from  his 
ocean  base  and,  humanly  speaking,  in  a  hole.  His  own 
colour,  I  say,  abandoned  this  white  prophet,  and  then 
it  was  a  black  man  came  to  the  rescue.  What  saith  the 
Scripture  ?  "So  Ebed-melech  the  Ethiopian  took  the  men 
with  him,  and  went  into  the  house  of  the  king  under  the 
treasury,  and  took  thence  old  cast  clouts  and  old  rotten 
rags,  and  let  them  down  by  cords  into  the  dungeon  to 
Jeremiah.  And  Ebed-melech  the  Ethiopian  said  unto 
Jeremiah,  Put  now  these  cast  clouts  and  rotten  rags  under 
thine  arm-holes  under  the  cords.  ...  So  they  drew  up 
Jeremiah  and  took  him  out  of  the  dungeon."  A  widow's 
mite  and  a  negro's  rotten  rags  and  cast-off  clothes — how 
like  God  to  honour  them  with  such  a  royal  recognition. 

Well  it  is  we  have  no  Society  guaranteeing  us  a  salary, 
for  the  said  Society  would  be  politely  and  cleverly  baftled 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  219 

how  to  get  at  us  with  £  s.  d.  Shut  off  from  our  nearest 
bank  one  thousand  miles,  surely  here  is  a  true  test  of  faith. 

{1st  July.) 

In  our  little  mud  Mission  House  we  have  a  number 
of  redeemed  slaves  around  us,  but  they  are  nearly  all  a 
bad  lot.  Studying  slavery  as  I  am  daily  doing  here  at 
its  fountainhead  in  the  Far  Interior,  this  is  the  honest 
deduction  of  it  all  :  rug  up  a  man  from  the  roots  of  his 
being — home,  kinsmen  and  liberty — then  transplant  him  as 
captive  chattel,  and  verily,  not  even  the  warm  fostering 
care  of  a  rescuing  Missionary  can  soften  the  grudge  out 
of  liim.  Here,  for  instance,  is  a  case  in  point.  A  band 
of  slave-children,  recaptured  from  the  Arabs,  is  domesti- 
cated in  a  model  Mission  known  to  me.  The  years  pass, 
the  ex-slaves  are  trained  and  fostered  so  painstakingly 
that  the  good  Lady  Missionary  has  literally  turned  the 
tables,  and  become  the  slave  of  the  ex-slaves.  Yet  these 
jet-black  beauties  have  their  growling  grudge  still. 
Wondering  what  it  all  means,  you  push  investigations, 
and  after  a  few  exploring  remarks,  you  find — can  you 
take  it  in  ? — that  these  rescue  Missionaries  are  only 
reckoned  the-last-there/ore-the-worst  link  in  the  long 
chain  of  captivity.  For,  remember,  after  all,  Home  is 
sweet  Home  to  the  tiniest  baby  negro,  and  the  smallest 
of  them,  far  away  in  captivity,  sings  a  song  of  his 
fatherland  : — 

"  Can  Vemba'c  land  bo  old  1    Never  ! 
Yes,  old  it  may  be 
And  coa.so  to  bo  free, 
But  Vemba  is  Vemba  for  ever." 


220  THINKING  BLACK 

Thus  each  gang  of  slaves  is  really  a  nest  of  hornets,  and 
patriotism  is  throbbing  in-  every  black  breast.    Try  to 
bribe  this  exiled  slave  with  a  sugar  sop  and  he  sniffs  with 
suspicion  at  the  very  sugar.    Kwetu !  is  his  magic  word 
for  "  Home,"  and  there  is  clannish  courtesy  in  the  very 
grammar  of  the  plural :  you  dare  not  say  "  My  Home  " 
in  broad  Africa.    "  Our  Home  "  is  the  compound  family 
formula.    In  fact,  there  is  no  such  word  as  "  Home  "  apart 
from  plural  usage,  which  proves  that  enshrined  within 
the  one  word  "  Our   Home "  there  is  locked  up  the 
vision  of  all  his  kinsmen  dear.    This  astounding  attempt 
of  a  slave  race  to  coin  and  copyright  a  speciality  in  such 
a  word  as  "Home"  even  beats  its  famous  English  rival : 
beats  it,  I  say,  because  at  least  we  can  use  "Home"  with 
or  without  any  pronoun  we  like,  but  the  African  has  so 
tricked  the  tongue  that  no  word  for  "  Home "  exists 
apart  from  a  pronoun — "Our  Home"  or  "Your  Home." 
To  say  mere  "  Home "  is  not  merely  bad  form,  but  no 
form  at  all.    There  is  no  such  usage.    Now,  lest  per- 
adventure  this  be  thought  mere  "  Exeter  Hall,"  you  must 
stand  with   me,  and  listen  to   a  slave  crooning  his 
"logical"  rhyme  against  the  very  idea  of  human  bond- 
age.   Literally  there  are  both  rhyme  and  reason  in  the 
words  : — 

"As  a  bird  in  the  course  of  its  flight, 
On  some  branch  will  not  choose  to  aliglit, 

For  it  likes  not  the  tree, 
So  man's  heart  doth  resemble  a  bird, 
To  coerce  it  would  be  as  absurd. 

For  the  heart  must  be  free." 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  221 

Surely  this  doggerel  proves  that  the  old  phrase  "as  free 
as  a  bird  "  is  a  world-wide  metaphor.  Thus  you  see  that 
even  in  grinding  slavery  your  despised  negro  chattel  gets 
poetry  out  of  his  prose  of  life  by  thinking  of  the  old 
home  in  the  Luban  marsh  where  "  mama  "  (yes,  the  same 
old  English  word)  is  longing  for  her  lost  bairn.  One  such 
mother  I  redeemed  from  her  fifth  term  of  slavery,  the 
story  all  being  told  in  that  inconsequential  tone  that 
makes  one  proud  to  live  and  die  for  old  Africa.  For  there 
was  a  haggard  woman  explaining  nonchalantly  that  five 
times  she  had  sold  herself  into  slavery  because  her  little 
boy  who  changed  bondmasters  was  a  slave ;  each  time  she 
followed  up  her  son,  gladly  enduring  bondage  under  five 
slave-owners,  in  order  to  be  near  her  boy.  This  was  time 
number  five  when  I  broke  her  chains !  And  all  for 
maternal  love.  That  lad  grew  up  to  be  one  of  our 
earliest  converts  on  Lake  Mweru,  many  of  his  best 
natural  qualities  coming  from  that  slave  mother.  Some- 
body was  right,  surely,  when  he  said  so  sagely  :  "I  think 
it  must  be  somewhere  written  that  the  virtues  of  the 
mothers  shall  occasionally  be  visited  on  their  children  as 
well  as  the  sins  of  their  fathers." 

#  *  # 

Probably,  the  most  striking  thing  to  be  seen  at  the 
Bunkeya  capital  is  the  roaring  function  of  a  "Triumph" 
when  a  returning  general  is  acclaimed  as  victor  by  the 
assembled  multitude.  Never  did  Roman  general  thunder- 
ing down  the  Via  Appia  with  his  victorious  legions  at 
his  heels  feel  more  inflated  with  feat  of  arms.    This  is  the 


222 


THINKING  BLACK 


day  when  negro  festivities  reach  their  zenith  and  even 
deep-dyed  enemies  agree  to'  sink  their  grudge  and  run 
with  the  full  tide  of  good  cheer.  The  Lunda  man  who, 
otherwise  and  elsewhere,  would  avoid  his  Luban  enemy  as 
though  he  were  a  pestilence,  is  to-day  in  high  glee  feast- 
ing on  the  common  bounty.  Thousands  and  thousands 
of  slaves  are  here  drinking  themselves  tipsy,  the  very 
drink  being  the  famous  "barley  wine "  of  Xenophon  and 
Tacitus.  With  all  the  sympathies  and  animosities  of 
cats  and  dogs,  here  you  have  them  for  one  brief  day 
deceiving  each  other  into  a  false  fraternity  as  frothy  as 
their  gallons  of  beer. 

Twisting  into  the  capital  since  daybreak,  and  from 
all  points  of  the  compass,  you  might  have  seen  the  beer 
caravans  arrive,  drums  roaring,  goats  and  sheep  piping 
a  shrill  treble  to  swell  the  noise  of  festivity.  Every  rag 
of  coloured  calico  is  to-day  sported  in  the  sunshine,  the 
essential  bit  of  the  rig-out  being  a  turban  of  some  sort. 
Meanwhile  the  great  Mushidi,  who  is  bent  on  besting  his 
imaginary  rival,  is  in  the  hands  of  his  satraps,  who  are 
dressing  him  up  for  the  show,  the  distinctive  feature  of 
his  purple  and  fine  linen  being  a  vesture,  twenty  or 
thirty  yards  long,  to  which  they  finally  add  his  regalia 
of  "Omande"  shells.  Certainly  he  takes  the  shine  out 
of  everybody,  for  hanging  round  his  neck,  like  a  walk- 
ing Christmas  tree,  they  have  dangled  scissors,  looking- 
glasses,  and  curious  sundries. 

But  where,  you  ask,  is  the  victorious  general  all  the 
while  ?    Denied  entry,  he,  be  it  noted,  has  been  hanging 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  223 

round  impatiently  for  weeks  on  the  remote  outskirts  of 
the  city,  Mushidi  simulating  a  yawn  at  every  mention  of 
his  name,  and  petulantly  refusing  "to  vote"  the  said 
Triumph.  So  true  to  the  Roman  analogy  is  it  all,  that 
the  river  Luusala  has  been  marked  oS  as  this  General's 
Rubicon,  across  which  he  dare  not  come  unless  officially 
notified  to  do  so.  Runners,  however,  are  daily  pouring 
in  from  his  camp  to  jog  the  king's  memory  with  the  acts 
of  valour  of  his  shrewd  and  restless  warriors,  until  finally, 
out  of  sheer  exasperation,  the  great  "Tomboka"  day  is 
named.  Virtually,  of  course,  this  is  the  old  admission 
wrung  from  the  Csesars  by  the  Praetorian  Guard,  that  the 
King  is  only  King  because  of  their  swords. 

Mushidi's  simile  is  better  when  he  grudgingly  agrees 
that  his  army  and  he  are  related  to  each  other  as  the 
one  blade  of  the  scissors  is  to  the  other — you  can  only  cut 
the  political  cloth  as  they  snip  together.  And  now  all  is 
open-mouthed  expectancy,  for  Mushidi  is  borne  aloft  on  a 
zebra-skin  palanquin  by  more  than  a  hundred  men,  and  a 
far-ofi"  war-song  tells  of  the  approaching  general  and  his 
army.  Then  the  royal  drums  answer  the  distant  call,  the 
hoarse  advancing  cries  quickly  becoming  louder  and 
louder.  Here  they  are  at  last  coming  sprinting  round  the 
corner,  the  advance  guard  flourishing  their  arms  with 
mimic  menace,  every  man  of  them  sporting  one  or  several 
putrid  skulls  with  a  trophy-taunt.  Then  comes  Mukanda- 
vantu,  the  general,  flushed  with  victory,  and,  following 
him,  the  long  string  of  slaves  captured  in  war.  How 
reminiscent  all  this  of  Paul  glorying  in  the  fact  that  he 


224 


THINKING  BLACK 


was  Christ's  bondslave  and  led  about  in  triumph  as 
Christ  the  Conqueror's  trophy. 

Swollen  with  pride  and  satisfaction,  the  generalissimo 
advances  with  a  strut  into  the  centre  of  this  vast  sea  of 
brilliantly  clad  negroes,  followed  by  the  captured  chiefs, 
or  prisoners  of  high  status,  hard  in  his  wake,  this  line  of 
the  captured  tailing  off  in  the  broken-kneed  dregs  of 
slavery.  They  are  nearly  all  women,  however,  a  proof 
this  that  the  men  they  fought  were  really  masculine 
enough  to  die  rather  than  be  captured — hence  these  heaps 
of  heads  hidden  in  clouds  of  flies.  One  brute,  you  notice, 
has  three  skulls  tied  together  dangling  from  his  mouth, 
and  Mushidi  claims  all  these  heads  by  formally  descending 
from  his  throne  and  putting  his  foot  on  each  one :  a  sort 
of  trampling  on  the  necks  of  his  enemies,  I  suppose. 
Meanwhile,  the  army  has  fired  a  deafening  feu  de  joie 
point  blank  in  our  faces,  and  then  begins  a  show  of  sham 
fighting  during  which  different  detachments  are  seen  in 
attack  and  retreat,  now  simulating  a  clever  ambush  and 
anon  springing  like  panthers  from  the  grass.  There  is  an 
end  to  all  this,  and  a  facetious  one.  Like  Nero,  who  was 
vain  of  his  music,  Mushidi  has  the  vanity  to  think  that 
he  can — dance.  Dull,  dazed,  and  dumbfounded  you,  a 
spectator,  can  scarcely  believe  your  eyes  when  the  old 
man  is  seen  to  descend  and  begin  his  rheumatic  shuffles,  a 
dancing  bear  indeed  !  Nearly  tripped  by  his  own  bunched- 
up  vesture,  these  contortions  are  a  speciality,  and  called 
the  R.A.A.  dance — Royal  August  Antics,  that  is  to  say 
Could  you  not  more  truthfully  translate  this  R.A.A, 


SHUT  IN,  BUT  ALMOST  OUT  225 

'*  Reductio  ad  ahsurdum "  performance  ?  Have  you 
caught  the  picture  ?  An  old  man  trying  to  dance  with  a 
thirty-yards-long  loin-cloth  artistically  bunched  out  in 
flounces  round  him,  and  worn  just  as  the  planet  Saturn 
wears  his  rings. 

Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  all  these  fireworks  and  army 
antics,  you  can  see  at  a  glance  that  this  mass  of  men 
without  drill  is  only  a  poor  decentralised  mob  run  on  the 
go-as-you-please  idea.  The  only  apology  you  can  make 
for  it  is  when  you  rub  up  your  history  a  bit,  and  remember 
that  this  feudal  system  of  every  sub-chief  collecting  the 
men  of  his  district  and  mobilising  around  the  king  is  the 
only  thing  the  world  knew,  from  the  days  of  Moses  up  to 
the  time  when  Cromwell  raised  the  first  standing  army. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
Black  Suffragettes 


"Shrine  of  the  Mighty!  can  it  be 
That  this  is  all  remains  of  thee  ? ' 


*  *  * 

"I  have  seen  the  wicked  in  great  power,  and 
spreading  himself  like  a  green  bay  tree.  Yet  he 
passed  away,  and,  lo,  he  was  not ;  yea,  I  sought  him, 
but  he  could  not  be  found."         Psalm  xxxyii.  35,  36. 

*  *  * 

*'  I  am  the  green  bay  tree  [Chitavatava]  who  first 

sprouted  in  Sanga  land."  The  Emperor  Mushidi. 

«  «  « 

"And  so  they've  voted  the  Devil  out, 
And  of  course  the  Devil's  gone ; 
But  simple  people  would  like  to  know. 
Who  carries  his  business  on?" 


CHAPTER  XIII 


Black  Suffragettes 

HEREIN  it  is  clearly  and  con- 
sistently demonstrated  that  even 
a  worm  will  turn. 

{10th  July.) 

MORE  executions  of  women,  which  means  more 
putrefying  skulls  and  clouds  of  blue-bottle  flies. 
Skulls  heaped  on  long  rustic  tables,  skulls  hanging 
up  on  trees  like  hat-pegs,  skulls  with  yawning  mouths  that 
would  not  shut  even  in  death.  This  Bluebeard  business, 
remember,  means  hard  detective  work,  and  the  Emperor 
spends  sleepless  nights  raiding  his  own  harems.  Five 
hundred  (and  a  fraction)  wives  and  not  a  padlock  in  the 
land.  It  is  on  this  sorry  score  blood  runs  in  torrents, 
for  the  paramours  are  legion,  and  often  the  true,  because 
prior,  husbands  of  the  stolen  women.  Mushidi  knows  all 
this  and  more,  knows  he  must  keep  running  to  the  red, 
reckless  expedient  of  killing  even  on  suspicion.  For  owing 
to  the  ramifications  of  this  polygamic  mob  of  wives  and 
concubines,  it  is  now  easily  evident  that  even  Mushidi  has 
outwitted  Mushidi.    It  has  become  his  nightmare  this, 

for  how  is  he  to  order  his  house  in  the  severe  sense 

m 


230 


THINKING  BLACK 


demanded  by  his  status  ?  Are  not  his  most  trusty 
Kalamas  all  equally  suspect  ?  A  Kalama  is  a  chamber- 
lain, but  the  very  watchmen  are  the  thieves,  and  the 
Arabs  are  right  when  they  say  of  these  traitors,  that 
Mushidi  had  given  "  the  cat  the  duty  of  keeping  the  key 
of  the  pigeon-house "  !  Exasperated  as  he  is,  it  is  just 
here  Bluebeard  yawns  and  resigns  all  pretensions  to  deal- 
ing judicially  and  fairly  with  his  victims.  Baulked  in 
a  systematic  scheme  of  spying,  he  has  resorted  to 
"dreaming"  his  victim,  ignoring  the  fact  that  even  in 
upside-down  Africa  dreams  go  by  the  contrary.  Did  he 
not  himself  tell  me  the  other  day  that  having  dreamed  a 
banquet,  there  must  be  a  famine  ?  Poor  Mushidi !  This 
endless  round  of  harem  marriages  is  a  bad,  black  business 
for  the  country.  Killing  his  wronged  victim  as  he  does, 
he  only  comes  off  second  best.  For  at  least  the  doomed 
slave  has  relief  from  his  bondsman's  groan  in  a  sharp, 
short  death,  but  how  can  Mushidi  escape  the  thraldom  of  his 
own  heart  ?  He  has  brute  power  enough  to  kill  them  in 
heaps,  but  how  much  more  horrible  if  Mushidi  had  the 
power  to  compel  them  to  live.  From  what  I  am  learning 
these  days,  seemingly  the  true  definition  of  "  tyrant"  is  a 
man  who  finds  his  happiness  in  the  unhappiness  of  others. 
Little  does  the  merciless  old  brute  guess  that  judgment 
has  a  rod  in  pickle  for  himself  even  now.  He  forgets  that 
to  refuse  to  forgive  is  to  cut  down  the  bridge  you  yourself 
must  one  day  cross.  His  is  the  old  thick-headed  idea 
that  it  is  possible  by  digging  far  enough  into  the  human 
body  with  a  spear  to  arrive  at  the  real  living  man.  But 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  231 

even  now  the  reflex  revenge  is  speeding  on  its  way  to  keep 
the  sure  law  that  a  tyrant  is  best  embalmed  in  his  own 
blood.  Here  he  is  day  by  day  despising  our  glorious 
Gospel ;  flattery,  sickly  flattery,  is  his  mode  of  attempting 
to  spike  our  Gospel  guns,  and  the  glib  tongue  reveals  a 
hard  old  heart  seared  to  it  all.  Preach  on  Love  with  a 
capital  letter,  and  by  a  wriggle  he  is  out  of  the  whole 
subject  in  a  moment — what  does  he,  a  polygamist,  want 
with  the  Love  that  passeth  the  love  of  women  ?  King  or 
slave,  this  glibness  of  tongue  is  Africa's  endless  horror. 
Wherever  you  move  the  wise  old  saw  perfectly  expresses 
our  longing :  Rather  a  negro  heart  without  words,  than 
negro  words  without  heart. 

{Later. ) 

Now  let  me  try  to  tackle  in  cold  ink  this  horror  of 
polygamy — a  subject,  alas,  almost  certain  to  incur  the 
vitiating  touch  of  coarseness.  We  have  already  seen 
all  the  Mushidi  institutions  built  on  the  bedrock  of 
Nature's  precedents  among  the  animals.  (Precedent,  not 
principle,  remember,  is  the  only  law  in  Africa.)  Here, 
then,  in  his  colossal  system  of  polygamy,  you  see 
only  another  instance  of  the  Bantu  curriculum  in  the 
University  of  the  Beasts.  A  sociologist  far  away  in 
England  can  work  up  a  whole  bookcase  of  plausible 
data  on  such  an  ancient  subject,  toying  with  his  pet-doll 
theory  before  the  study  fire.  But  here,  on  the  edge  of 
Lufira  Valley,  you  frankly  see  polygamy  cradled  amongst 
the  zebras  and  antelopes.  Thence,  anon  (and  quite  as 
frankly),  you  see  the  same  polygamy  invade  the  native 


232 


THINKING  BLACK 


town  from  the  plains.  Who,  for  instance,  does  this 
Bluebeard  chief  pretend  to  be,  if  not  "  the  bull  of  the 
herd  "  ?  Again  and  again  I  hear  beast-precedents  quoted 
in  support  of  native  customs,  and  all  in  the  gruesome 
formula :  "So  hath  the  Lord  commanded  us."  Thus 
this  old  Emperor  with  his  mob  of  five  hundred  wives  is 
merely  an  attempt  to  live  a  la  the  Lufira  quadrupeds.  At 
Munema  I  heard  some  Court  gossip  about  an  exceptional 
Amazon  who  was  numbered  among  these  '*  hen-cooped " 
wives.  This  woman — no  slattern  she ! — dared  to  preach 
in  a  dark,  hinting  way  the  far-off  dream  of  women's 
rights,  but  King  Bluebeard  got  wind  of  it  through  her 
rival.  With  regrettable  vulgarity,  Mushidi  called  the 
propagandist  "a  goat"  for  such  silly  speech.  "Yea,  my 
lord,"  Mrs.  Amazon  pouted,  "  even  the  goats  are  a 
model  marriage,  for  the  female  has  as  good  a  pair  of 
horns  as  the  Billy." 

•  #  # 

Have  just  had  a  long  talk  with  our  Mrs.  Amazon, 
and  a  strange  story  this  Shila  woman  tells.  A  real 
Sufiragette,  she  is  the  member  of  a  woman's  secret 
society  that  boasts  of  big  deeds  in  days  gone  by. 
Listen  to  this  eye-opening  history  of  such  an  incredible 
woman's  movement  in  Far  Central  Africa. 

"  Why  is  it,"  she  asks,  "  that  the  foreign  Lunda  tribe 
is  now  in  the  ascendant  around  Lake  Mweru  ? "  Well, 
a  family  dynastic  brawl  did  it  all,  and  a  woman  (again  !) 
"  was  in  the  transgression."  Nkuva,  the  lord  paramount, 
was  her  own  brother,  but  did  he  not  dare  to  slay  and 


ONE   OF   MUSHIDTS   500  WIVES. 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  233 


skiu  her  son,  his  nephew,  to  make  a  kingly  carpet  of 
the  human  cuticle  ?  To  have  her  son  thus  so  literally 
"  trampled  upon "  in  both  life  and  death  was  too 
exasperating  for  the  Princess,  and  in  hot  revenge  she 
called  in  the  foreign  Lunda  tribe  from  the  Far  West. 
This,  then,  is  the  real  beginning  of  the  famous  Kazembe 
rule  in  the  Luapula  Valley,  and  by  a  woman's  invitation, 
and  not  conquest,  are  they  there.  So  typical  is  it  all, 
that  when  you  try  to  unravel  the  tangled  tale  of  any 
African  tribe's  history,  a  few  exploring  remarks  reveal 
that  some  silly  daughter  of  Eve  robbed  them  of  their 
Eden — yes,  box  the  African  compass,  and  one  key  will 
unlock  all  the  dynastic  locks  :  Cherchez  la  Jemme.  That 
Princess,  though,  had  to  pay  a  big  bill  for  this  the  sweet- 
ness and  terror  of  her  revenge.  For  when  the  avenging 
Lunda  arrived  from  the  West,  the  leader  ominously 
struck  his  spear  into  a  tall  sycamore  tree,  thus  arrogating 
to  himself  dominion  over  all  these  Luapula  lands.  In 
other  words,  having  entered  by  the  Western  doorway, 
he  forthwith  locked  the  door,  putting  the  imaginary  key 
in  his  imaginary  pocket.  Thus,  even  thus,  were  the 
Shila  folk  driven  forth  from  their  Eden,  just  as,  not 
John  Milton,  but  a  woman,  was  the  real  authoress  of 
Paradise  Lost.    But  watch  the  Suffragette  sequel. 

Far  from  degrading  the  cause  of  woman  in  the  Far 
Interior,  this  very  feminine  treachery  stiffened  the  back 
of  her  sex,  and  really  conduced  to  the  amelioration  of 
her  lot  as  the  degraded  chattel  of  her  black  partner. 

This,  in  fact,  is  the  true  genesis  of  that  "Zenobia"  class 
'5 


234 


THINKING  BLACK 


of  women  chiefs  to  be  found  in  the  land.  To  this  day 
the  common  ruse  of  a  "crushed  wife  is  to  make  a 
gracefully  turned  allusion  to  that  revolutionary  deed  of 
a  negress  long  ago,  the  covert  threat  in  her  hint  being 
that  what  woman  has  done,  woman  can  and  will  do. 
And  the  husband  brute  has  the  sense  to  wince  truculently 
at  the  very  memory  of  that  woman's  treachery  long  ago, 
his  sheepish,  discomfited  look  revealing  that  the  woman 
has  struck  home.  Certes,  there  is  nothing  can  move 
a  drowsy  old  African  like  a  jag  from  past  history. 
Having  no  literature,  the  African  as  a  consequence 
clings  tenaciously  to  the  past  precedents  of  his  race, 
the  antiquity  of  a  fact  being  its  sanctity. 

But  there  is  more  to  follow.  Far  more  interesting 
than  this  ascent  of  woman  to  the  status  of  a  Zenobia 
queenship  is  her  daring  to  combine,  and  form  this  great 
secret  society  of  theirs  into  which  no  man  dare  penetrate. 
All  pivoted  on  that  one  woman's  wrong  long  ago  when  her 
son  was  skinned  to  make  a  human  carpet.  These  black 
women  let  their  unfettered  fancies  roam  over  the  vast 
sphere  of  their  sex's  wrongs,  and  this  black  Club  of  theirs 
is  the  sacred  confessional.  Often  a  husband  goes  foodless 
if  Mrs.  Amazon  is  attending  a  Club  meeting,  and  oftener 
the  happy  and  harmless  wife  becomes,  after  initiation, 
"  a  new  woman  "  indeed. 

"  Budindu"  is  the  name  of  this  female  freemasonry, 
and  many  a  feminine  titter  can  be  overheard  at  the  expense 
of  the  men.  The  rites  of  initiation  are  nameless,  but  the 
general  idea  is  that  of  a  Benefit  Society,  whose  supreme 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


235 


function  is  to  scrutinise  the  cause  of  death  of  any  of  its 
members.  As  African  men  often  play  their  women  the 
scurviest  of  tricks,  it  is  absolutely  necessary  that  these 
women  combine  in  some  sort  to  beat  the  tom-tom  of  their 
sex.  This  secret  society  it  was  that  decreed  a  "  Married 
Women's  Property  Act "  long  before  the  belated  English 
Act  of  1883,  and  on  the  death  of  one  of  their  guild  they 
pounce  down  on  her  moveable  estate  "  to  the  uttermost 
farthing."  Some  of  these  female  Club  decisions  have 
indeed  assumed  portentous  proportions  in  the  high  poli- 
tics of  Central  Africa,  a  notorious  instance  being  the 
ceding  of  the  whole  north  shore  of  Lake  Mweru  to  satiate 
a  Budindu  Club  claim.  For  they  fastened  on  the  Lake 
King  with  the  almost  trifling  plea  that  one  of  their  princess 
(Inam/umu)  members  of  the  guild  had  been  delivered  of  a 
still-born  child,  and  for  this  "  crime  "  the  King  of  all  Mweru 
(her  husband)  was  forced  to  pay  a  large  slice  of  territory. 
Beginning  at  the  Muntemune  River  on  the  north-west 
corner  of  the  Lake,  and  sweeping  right  round  the  map 
as  far  as  Kalembwe's  on  the  east,  this  poor  henpecked  King 
solemnly  expropriated  himself  of  all  that  land  to  appease 
the  "  lioness  robbed  of  her  whelp,"  i.e.  the  princess  who 
bore  him  the  still-born  child.  This,  in  fact,  was  the 
biggest  legal  fish  the  Club  ever  fried,  and  these  Suffragette 
Lake  ladies  clothe  themselves  with  impressivencss  as  they 
tell  the  twice-tohl  tale  of  this,  the  Waterloo  of  their  Club. 
Yet,  so  binding  and  final  was  this  territorial  decision 
that  to  this  day,  if  an  elephant  dies  in  the  waters  of  the 
Muntemune  with  its  head  pointing  to  the  north  bank. 


236 


THINKING  BLACK 


then  the  ivory  is  claimed  by  Mpweto  at  the  Lualaba 
crossing. 

{Later.) 

As  farther  West,  so  too  here  in  the  Interior,  there  is 
the  usual  African  massacre  of  the  innocents  ;  "  dentition 
deaths "  these  are  called.  Read  this  Luban  episode. 
Here  is  a  bonnie  baby  doomed  to  die  because  its  little 
milk  teeth  "sprouted"  on  the  wrong — i.e.  the  upper — 
gum  first.  Far  from  being  the  usual  little  black  bundle 
of  screams,  behold,  a  dear  little,  queer  little  morsel  who 
must  be  murdered.  This  dental  abnormity  is  the  tribal 
terror,  for  every  negro  must  go  the  way  of  his  blood,  must 
wear  the  blinkers,  so  to  say,  must  follow  his  father's  lead. 
Here,  then,  is  a  baby  who  dares  so  early  to  break  normal 
precedent  in  the  fashion  of  teeth,  and  the  cherub  must  die 
as  a  monster.  No  Rachel  ever  weeps  for  such  a  child, 
and  when  the  mother  detects  the  first  tooth  on  the  wrong 
gum  she  flees  from  the  innocent,  frozen  with  fright.  For 
does  not  the  proverb  say  that  the  babe  that  breaks  the 
normal  law  of  dentition  must  be  broken  ?  Lutala  is  the 
child's  name,  and  the  idea  is  that  there  is  a  fiend  taking 
ambush  inside  such  an  abnormal  baby,  therefore  death  is 
the  doom.  For  if  a  demon  be  inside  baby,  and  baby  be 
inside  the  town  stockade,  then  woe  to  that  town,  and  woe 
to  that  baby.  The  chief  Nkuva  is  a  case  in  point.  He 
was  the  father  of  three  bouncing  boys  all  of  whom  he 
murdered  in  succession,  the  appearance  of  the  upper  teeth 
doing  it  all.  When  dentition  drew  near  the  poor  mother 
spent  three  agonising  days  in  suspense,  each  baby  being 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  237 

spurned  like  a  serpent  when  he  revealed  his  terrible  upper 
teeth  first.  But  No.  3  settled  matters,  and  the  chief 
having  spurned  his  babies,  finally  spurned  their  mother  as 
the  latent  cause  of  it  all.  Instead,  however,  of  this  dis- 
graceful divorce  dislocating  her  whole  life  as  in  England, 
she  married  a  negro  friend  of  mine ;  their  first  baby  had 
normal  dentition,  and  now  the  lady  flourishes  this  fact 
in  the  face  of  her  ex-spouse  with  withering  scorn.  The 
Kingdom  of  God,  however,  is  not  for  goody-goodies,  and 
this  very  murderer  of  babies  broke  with  it  all  and  yielded 
to  the  Christ  Who  loved  little  ones.  "  Suffer  the  little 
children  to  come  unto  Me,"  said  He — yea,  and  let  their 
murderers  come  also.  Was  not  Christ's  first  offer  of 
pardon  to  His  own  murderers  ? 

But  in  Africa  it  never  rains  but  it  pours,  and  here, 
while  the  ink  is   still   wet,  my  boy  Mirambo  comes 
fluttering  in  with  devastating  tidings.    Just  back  home 
from  the  South,  he  finds  his  baby-boy  has  disappeared. 
Query,  Where  is  baby  ?    Then  ekes  out  the  tale  of  another 
"  dentition  death,"  this  story  being  quite  a  speciality,  for 
baby  was  so  hearty  that  he  had  sprouted  both  an  upper 
and  a  lower  tooth  at  the  same  time.    What  must  be  done  ? 
A  fisherman  took  baby  away  out  into  mid-Lake,  and  baby 
even  laughed  with  glee  as  the  bad  man  tied  a  rope  round 
his  waist  and  on  that  rope  a  stone.    Baby  even  crowed 
when  the  fisherman  took  him  up  in  his  arms,  but  splash 
went  bonnie  baby  into  blue  Mweru.    And  all  because 
he  was  a  neutral  and  had  teeth  on  both  gums  on  the 
same  day  ! 


238 


THINKING  BLACK 


A  tremendous  business  this  teetliino;  institution. 
Farther  North,  a  Chief  with  quite  a  dandified  air 
produced  a  royal  babe  who  had  passed  the  curious 
ceremony  of  "  the  justification  of  the  child."  He  certified 
the  youngster  as  his  very  own,  the  scion  of  a  Hoyal 
House,  with  the  real  Kalamata  nose  as  flat  as  a  button  and 
the  real  Kalamata  pugnacious  bawl.  Or  to  speak  in  the 
language  of  printers  and  publishers,  an  exact  edition  in 
duodecimo  of  the  larger  work  in  folio,  both  bound  in  best 
brown  leather.  Baby  was  beplastered  with  white  chalk, 
and  feeling  so  uncomfortable  that  he  bawled  as  loudly  as 
though  he  were  twins.  For  to-day  his  delighted  mother 
could  scarcely  believe  her  eyes  when  she  beheld  her  ofi"- 
spriug  had  really  sprouted  a  tooth  normally — and  bang  ! 
went  an  old  flintlock  to  herald  the  great  news.  A  long 
swing  of  the  pendulum  this,  for  up  to  this  point  the 
child  has  been  looked  at  askance,  and  reckoned  only  a 
mere  "/if" — won't  somebody  invent  a  new  pronoun? — a 
mere  mushroom  pretender  to  babyhood,  your  toothless 
child  being  a  nonentity.  Right  on  from  birth,  the 
Spartan  mother  has  made  him  rough  it,  all  injudicious 
coddling  being  considered  detrimental.  No  rag  of  calico 
is  bare  baby  allowed  to  wear,  even  out  in  the  cold  night 
air,  the  elastic  functions  of  the  body  thus  getting  a  chance 
to  be  exercised.  Malnutrition  they  do  object  to,  however, 
and^the  cherub  is  nearly  choked  by  the  purely  mechanical 
manner  a  coarse  porridge  is  rammed  down  his  little  throat. 
The  youngster's  mouth  is  opened  so  wide  that  it  mono- 
polises nearly  five-sixtlis  of  his  face,  and  through  this  huge 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  239 


aperture  the  porridge  is  pushed  home,  baby  the  while 
nearly  kicking  his  little  feet  off  as  the  alarming  alterna- 
tive to  howling.  This  ventral  distension  is  finally  so 
alarming  that  they  must  leave  off  on  the  plea  of  incapacity, 
the  trouble  being  not  too  much  porridge  but  too  little 
baby-boy.  Yet  all  this  is  mere  dessert,  for,  to  the 
cannibal,  nothing  can  compensate  for  "  God's  own  sacred 
way  of  giving  milk  " — his  mother's  breast.  Of  course, 
they  bathe  the  rogue,  but  the  bath  is  not  such  an  affair  of 
immense  and  intricate  pomp  as  in  petted  England  :  with 
cold  water  in  the  cold  air  they  tone  up  the  small  black 
body  to  play  the  Luban  tune. 

Now,  however,  that  the  little  one  has  toed  the  tribal 
line  and  produced  this  terrible  tooth,  the  father  feels  as 
tall  as  the  Eiffel  Tower,  and  he  declares  his  son  "justified." 
The  technical  term  for  this  justification  is  the  old  Bible 
one,  "  I  will  give  him  the  white  stone,"  and  this  Jjupemha 
is  the  same  word  for  the  squaring  of  any  outstanding 
account — not  a  bad  idea  of  justification  for  a  man-eater. 
The  ridiculous  Mama  now  runs  with  the  tide  and  insists 
that  the  tooth  is  a  prize  sample  :  in  fact,  she  so  hugs 
Master  Tom  Thumb  that  when  I  last  saw  him  he  was  in 
a  state  of  suspended  animation.  This,  then,  is  the  sort  of 
christening  of  a  young  cannibal,  the  tribal  test  being  one 
of  tuskers.  Yet  they  sell  their  bonnie  bairns  for  a  mere 
song,  that  father  with  cold  glittering  eyes  coveting  calico 
in  exchange  for  his  own  flesh  and  blood — fancy  a  being 
wearing  a  warm  human  skin  bartering  his  own  blood 
and  bone !    You  can  cudgel  your  brains  for  a  reason, 


240 


THINKING  BLACK 


but  will  only  find  it  after  you  have  settled  that  other 
poser  of  why  he  can  eat  both  human  beef  and  bone. 
The  selling  is  surely  minor  in  comparison. 

{10th  August.) 
But  what  about  preaching  all  this  time  ?  Day  by  day, 
at  his  lordly  banquet  of  local  politics  one  is  itching  to  get 
in  a  word  of  wisdom  edgeways.  True,  our  evangel  is  the 
very  last  thing  Rex  wants,  but  as  even  roast  beef  however 
well  cooked  makes  bad  dessert,  I  proposed  that  he  should 
give  me  an  opening  for  my  creature-humbling,  Christ- 
exalting  Gospel.  To  delay  to  do  right  is  to  decide  to  do 
wrong — then  why  delay  ?  Told  him  that  even  a  pagan 
like  Aristotle  rounded  off  his  great  book  De  Mundo  by 
saying  that  it  would  be  impious  not  to  mention  the 
Creator  thereof.  This  sharp  shunting  on  to  another  line 
he  thought  a  bit  too  intrusive,  and  was  annoyed  that  I  did 
not  take  his  petty  polemics  much  more  seriously.  Why 
not  keep  to  the  easy-souled  paths  of  diplomatic  agreement  ? 
What  mad  moonshine  was  this  our  persistently  pointing 
up  to  God's  sky  and  calling  Hiiyi  true  King  of  Katanga  ? 
Was  not  he,  the  black  one.  Lord  of  the  land,  and  when 
every  cock  in  the  land  crowed  did  it  not  crow  "  Mushidi "  ? 
Every  man  in  the  country,  too,  did  he  not  make  the  pre- 
scribed prostrations  and  call  him  "  0  Lord  God  "  ?  He 
thinks  we  are  fools  for  disdaining  his  negro  politics,  pretty 
much,  I  suppose,  as  in  Paul's  day  the  Greek's  meaning  for 
the  word  "  idiot "  was  "  a  person  who  refused  to  meddle 
in  politics."    Little  he  knows  that  to  the  very  end  of  the 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


241 


age  God  represents  its  rulers  as  "  wild  beasts,"  the  one 
immediately  preceding  the  coming  of  the  "  King  of  kings  " 
being  the  biggest  beast  of  all — The  Beast. 

Only  once  can  I  recall  his  ever  sitting  out  a  formal 
meeting.  The  Chief  seemed  superbly  indifferent  during 
the  whole  sermon  on  "Blind  Bdrtimaeus,"  nevertheless  he 
had  his  innings  after  me,  preaching  a  counter  gospel  for 
the  Devil. 

"We  are  blind,  are  we?  Well,  then,  0  man  of  God, 
so  be  it,  and  please  note  (l)  that  a  blind  man  only  knows 
what  he  touches  with  his  fingers:  i.e.,  let  us  grip  your 
Gospel  in  our  fists,  and  then  we  will  believe  it. 

"  (2)  Remember,  also,  that  a  blind  man  must  be  careful 
of  what  he  eats  :  i.e.,  give  us  time  to  consider  your  Gospel 
for  a  century  or  two. 

"  Finally,  no  blind  man  ever  forgot  the  road  to  his 
mouth  :  i.e.,  if  we  find  this  Gospel  of  yours  to  be  beneficial, 
then  we  will  take  it  without  pressure."  Yet  people  think 
of  these  folks  as  dull-witted,  ox-eyed  blacks.  Only 
another  instance  of  the  old  truth  that  "  not  many  wise, 
not  many  noble,"  care  a  straw  for  salvation.  The  smallest 
streams  hold  the  biggest  trout,  and  our  happiest  times  arc, 
not  with  the  Chief,  but  with  outcasts  in  Sychar  ministry. 
Depend  upon  it,  the  publicans  and  harlots  will  go  into  the 
banquet  of  Life  before  King  Hoity-toity.  Ah,  if  sin  were 
only  better  known,  Christ  would  be  held  in  higher  esteem. 
#  #  # 

But  do  not  imagine  that  our  Muahidi  will  have  nothing 
to  do  with  religion.    Did  we  but  encourage  him  in  the 


242 


THINKING  BLACK 


idea,  this  is  the  mad  monarch  who  would  build  a  cathedral 
as  high  as  the  pyramids,  cementing  every  brick  with 
blood.  Yes, 

"  a  huge  temple,  decked  by  Herod's  pride, 
Who  fain  would  bribe  a  God  he  ne'er  believed." 

Anything  colossal  appeals  to  his  small  mind,  and  indeed 
the  proper  noun  "God"  is  in  daily  use  for  surpassing 
bulk  or  greatness.  He  would  dearly  love  to  send  out  a 
"  search  warrant "  for  a  congregation,  driving  in  hundreds 
to  this  Devil's  fold  by  sjambok.  He,  too,  would  negotiate 
baptisms  of  the  "  King  Menelik "  order,  "  baptism  by 
capture "  as  it  is  called.  Do  you  know  that  hundreds 
of  Africans  in  the  North  are  pounced  down  on  by  royal 
command,  and  en  masse  driven  like  silly  sheep  into  the 
river?  There  they  are  divided  into  bands,  the  Wolda 
Gabriel  and  Wolda  Jesus,  and  thus  they  sin  the  bad  old 
sin  of  making  Jesus  Christ  King  by  force.  Truly  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  suffereth  violence.  Was  it  not  the 
Church's  worst  day  when  it  was  able  to  shout  "  Victory  ! " 
on  a  successor  of  the  Caesars  holding  the  stirrup  for  a 
Christian  bishop  to  mount  his  horse  ?  But  all  this 
"  Defender  of  the  Faith "  role  is  denied  him :  it  would 
be  about  as  appropriate  to  allow  Mushidi  to  "  run  the 
Mission  "  as  it  is  to  see  Bishops  in  the  House  of  Lords 
or  a  lady  in  a  smoking  compartment.  Yet  he  has  his 
affectations  of  morality.  Oh  yes  !  This  is  the  old  show- 
man who  poses  as  an  angel  on  a  mud-heap.  By  way  of 
wrapping  the  robe  of  the  Pharisee  round  about  him  he 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


243 


daily  preaches  against  tobacco  as  either  snufF  or  smoke. 
Pipes  of  wood  or  pipes  of  gourd  are  all  taboo,  and  the  old 
definition  of  this  vain  thing  pleases  him  hugely  :  "  A  tube 
with  fire  at  one  end  of  it,  and  a  fool  at  the  other."  Only 
by  stealth  can  a  smoker  pufi"  his  cloud,  and  no  snufi"  is 
allowed  under  severe  penalty.  One  poor  fellow  who  forgot 
himself  into  the  indiscretion  of  a  pinch  of  snuff  in  the 
royal  presence  was  maimed  for  life.  The  punishment 
farther  North  for  this  nasal  inhalation  is  the  cutting  off 
of  the  lips.  Mushidi's  axiomatic  definition  of  tobacco  is 
*'  death,"  and  he  gets  leverage  for  this  idea  in  the  local 
etymology  of  the  word  Fwaka  =  tobacco,  i.e.  the  death- 
dealer.  Is  this  the  true  genesis  of  the  old  Raleigh  story 
of  his  servant  suspecting  he  was  "  on  fire  at  the  mouth  " 
and  pouring  cold  water  on  the  pioneer  smoker  ? 

*  *  * 

Mushidi,  I  find,  is  really  an  Emperor,  because  all  the 
aboriginal  kings  for  hundreds  of  miles  stream  in  and  do 
fealty.  No  fussy  genuflexion  this,  but  the  simple  and 
solitary  shout  "  Conqueror ! "  (Kashinde),  with  one 
clap  of  the  hands.  If  you  quiz  one  of  these  chiefs  as  to 
his  rights  of  kingship,  at  first  he  shivers  at  the  im- 
pertinence of  the  thing.  Pushing  investigations,  however, 
you  find  that  very  rarely  has  he  real  title-deeds,  and  not 
even  the  red  spear  of  Rob  Roy,  to  prove  his  rights.  The 
fact  is,  many  of  these  lesser  chiefs  have  won  territory  in 
lawsuits ;  not  hard  muscles  but  hard  moutlis  doing  it  all. 
Take  some  data.  Lokona  has  ancestral  rights  to  his 
territory,  because  the  first  of  his  dynasty  ate  a  dog  at  a 


244 


THINKING  BLACK 


neighbouring  king's  court.  Behold  that  first  Lokona 
forced  to  eat  his  first  dog,  yet  even  as  he  digests  this 
new  sort  of  canine  mutton  he  meditates  a  lawsuit,  the 
plea  running  :  "  Why  should  I,  a  salt-of-the-earth  Sera 
man,  be  so  insulted  in  being  invited  to  break  taboo  by 
eating  the  dog  of  a  barbarian  ? "  So  to  prove  great 
moral  wrong  inflicted  by  such  gastronomical  exertions 
over  an  unclean  pug,  this  founder  of  a  dynasty  turned 
sick  as  a  Bay  of  Biscay  voyager,  the  end  of  that  victorious 
vomit  being  the  ceding  of  large  tracts  of  territory,  flowing 
streams,  and  a  good  larder  of  antelopes  in  the  plains. 
Quite  a  brisk  bit  of  business  that  "beware  of  the  dog" 
lawsuit,  for  to  this  day,  far  from  railway  train  and 
teeming  city,  a  Lokona  still  reigns  in  the  sylvan  quiet 
of  his  forest.  Yea,  if  ever  in  the  far  future  one  of  the 
dynasty  boasts  of  note-paper  and  a  coat  of  arms,  it  is 
conceivable  that  he  will  have  worked  in  somewhere  a 
victorious  dog  in  the  family  crest. 

The  adjacent  fisher  chief  Muvanga,  who  owns  the 
Betlisaida  of  Lake  Mwcru,  has  likewise  lawsuit  title- 
deeds  to  his  bit  of  foreshore.  What  was  the  forensic  fight 
about  ?  For  many  a  year  these  Muvanga  chiefs  were 
poor  highlanders  forced  to  till  the  sour  soil  of  the 
plateau,  getting  only  a  glance  of  blue  Mweru  through 
the  trees.  Down  below,  the  fisher-folk  had  struck  it 
strong  in  an  endless  harvest  of  fish,  being  thus  fat  and 
filthy  in  obverse  ratio  to  the  leanness  and  cleanness  of 
the  hill-men.  With  the  acumen  of  an  old  campaigner, 
however,  the  chief  on  the  hill  knew  that  his  day  was 


IT'S  NOT  THE  HANDS  THAT  STEAL, 
BUT  THE  HEART. 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  245 


drawing  near — a  mere  chance  ultimately  changing  the 
colour  of  the  map — country,  I  mean,  for  the  negro  knows 
nothing  but  the  real  map  of  nature  drawn  to  the  scale  of 
eight  furlongs  to  one  mile.  Well,  the  happy  day  came  when 
one  of  the  hill-men,  prowling  down  in  the  plains,  spied  a 
crowd  of  Lake  dwellers  huzzahing  over  some  find  they 
had  made — iron-ore  it  turned  out  to  be.  But  shall  we 
not  rather  call  this  an  unhappy  find,  for  did  they  not 
seize  the  wandering  highlander  and  slay  him  as  a  sacrifice 
on  the  opening  of  the  mine?  Remember,  in  Africa, 
without  the  shedding  of  blood  there  is  no — no  anything,  so 
how  could  they  dare  exploit  this  new  mine  without  the 
traditional  human  sacrifice  ?  Indeed,  these  nude  capitalists 
of  long  ago  are  rather  reminiscent  of  modern  Steel  Trusts 
in  the  fact  that  they  believed  strongly  in  sacrifice,  but 
only  to  the  extent  of  making  some  scaj)cgoat  outsider  the 
sufferer.  So  they  slew  this  man  and  sprinkled  his  blood 
down  the  open  mine,  "  cleansing  by  blood "  the  mineral 
deposit.  And  thus  it  was  the  clock  of  destiny  struck  for 
those  hungry  hill-men,  their  vengeance  not  taking  the 
form  of  a  shrill  warcry  but  rather  a  long  nagging 
lawsuit.  For  days  and  months  they  doggedly  pushed 
their  claim  for  compensation,  the  fisher  chief  ^fongwe 
temporising  like  a  shrewd  old  lawyer.  A  tangled  tale 
that  lawsuit,  a  tale  of  loops  and  ties,  loose  threads 
and  entanglements,  inconsistencies  and  nebulous  nothings. 
But  fine  words  even  in  Africa  butter  no  parsnips,  and 
finally  the  highlander  snatched  a  legal  victory — verdict: 
Tliat  the  said  Muvanga  receive  a  slice  of  foreshore  for  dry 


246 


THINKING  BLACK 


season  corn  and  a  share  in  the  fisheries  of  Lake  Mweru. 
Thus  the  meekest  of  all  the  Muvangas  climbed  to  the 
twin-summits  of  his  ancestral  ambitions,  and  red  blood 
did  it  all.  Then  it  is  the  nude  negro  makes  you  rub  up 
your  English  etymology,  for  do  not  "  blood,"  "  bloom," 
and  "  blossom  "  all  come  from  the  same  root  ?  And  here, 
in  the  mud-marshes  of  Africa,  do  not  the  tribesmen  say, 
"  No  blood,  no  blossom  "  ?  Quite  an  amusing  side-light 
all  this  on  Mr.  Stanley's  boast  that  in  founding  the 
Congo  Free  State  he  had  made  "  treaties  with  four  hundred 
and  fifty  independent  chiefs  whose  rights  would  have 
been  conceded  by  all  to  have  been  indisputable,  since  they 
held  their  lands  by  undisturbed  occupation  by  long  ages 
of  succession  by  real  divine  gift." 

But  "  'tis  always  morning  somewhere  in  the  world," 
and  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  Himself  has  added  a  happy 
postscript  to  this  history — ■!  mean,  the  conversion  of  this 
aboriginal  chief  whose  dynasty  it  was  that  shed  the 
sacrificial  blood.  Nongwe  is  his  name,  and  his  prede- 
cessor crossed  over  to  Kilwa  Island  one  night  to  rescue 
a  prisoner,  but  was  murdered  by  the  Arabs  just  as  he  was 
putting  out  to  sea  for  the  return  journey.  This  meant  a 
stampede  back  upon  us  at  Luanza,  leaving  the  lands  of  his 
ancestors  to  elephants  and  game.  But  those  Arab  curses 
again  were  merely  a  sort  of  upside-down  benediction. 
Certainly  God  made  the  wrath  of  Islam  to  praise  Him, 
one  vivid,  electrifying  flash  of  faith  saving  Nongwe's  soul 
to  eternity.  Thus,  by  a  long  roundabout  route,  Christ 
the  Sacrifice  redeemed  this  chief  from  all  the  troubles 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


247 


brought  upon  him  by  that  first  human  sacrifice  long  ago 
— by  blood  cometh  sorrow,  therefore  by  blood  cometh  joy. 
Yea,  I  might  almost  say  that  all  things  in  poor  old  Africa 
are  sprinkled  by  blood,  and  without  the  shedding  of 
blood  there  is  no — no  anything.  Little  did  these  old  negro 
miners  guess  how  symbolic  it  all  was,  that  spilling  of 
human  blood  to  celebrate  their  find  of  minerals — a  Trans- 
vaal War,  and  many  another  wrangle,  all  so  symbolised  in 
that  shedding  of  blood  over  ore. 

{Later. ) 

Hurrah !  here  they  come.  With  the  breaking  of  the 
south-west  monsoon  here  come  the  royal  rains  at  last — rains 
that,  at  first  blush,  seem  as  the  angels  of  God,  converting 
bare  brown  Africa  into  a  paradise  of  green.  Let  a  month 
rush  past,  however,  and  you  begin  to  take  back  all  your 
compliments,  for  this  grass  gets  out  of  hand,  becomes 
erratic  and  unreliable.  For  the  traveller,  too,  it  is  often 
one  long  dismal  succession  of  drip,  drizzle,  and  drench ; 
then,  as  the  rank  tangle  shoots  12  feet  high,  the  early 
ducal-park  aspect  of  the  meadows  is  lost  in  a  wild  pro- 
fusion of  stubborn  cane-grass  and  scrub.  And  thus,  in  a 
flash,  you  see  the  real  reason  in  so  logically  legislating 
for  Africa  such  a  clean-cut  system  of  half-and-half  weather, 
the  summer  seemingly  as  absurdly  wet  as  the  winter  is 
absurdly  dry.  For  owing  to  the  great  rivers  only  being 
so  many  mere  canals  with  inadequate  banks,  the  end  of 
the  rains  sees  them  leaping  over  into  the  plains  where  for 
months  they  wallow  in  merciless  marshes.  (The  truest 
snapshot  of  all  this  was  taken  by  Isaiah,  the  Prophet, 


248 


THINKING  BLACK 


long  before  the  days  of  "  Kodaks,"  when  he  described 
Africa  as  the  continent whose  land  the  nvers  have 
spoiled.")  The  sleeping-sickness  fly,  malarial  mosquito, 
and  endless  etceteras  are  all  cradled  there  in  these 
squelching  bogs  of  despair.  In  plain  English,  these 
marshes  mean  that  this  Africa  of  ours  is  really  rotting  for 
four  months  yearly,  and  all  to  the  tune  of  millions  of 
malarial  mosquitoes  humming  their  sweet  tenor. 

Then  cometh  climax.  For  sun,  stink,  and  sickness  get 
so  bad  that  the  God  Who  sitteth  o'er  all  waterfloods  calls 
an  imperative  halt  to  Nature  in  its  mad  career.  And  lo  ! 
from  mid  April  to  mid-October,  the  land  swings  back, 
like  a  pendulum,  to  the  exciting  extreme  of  a  season 
of  sun,  only  sun  with  not  a  dream  of  a  drop  of  rain. 
Monotonous  months  though  they  seem,  what  is  really 
happening  is  that  this  scorching  sun  is  most  surely  and 
solidly  drying  up  the  awful  fecundity  of  the  marshes. 
The  meteorological  objective,  in  fact,  of  all  this  is  a 
working  out  at  that  great  "spring  cleaning"  of  Africa 
called  "  the  smokes  "  :  now  it  is  our  dark  green  land  is  a 
weary  expanse  of  sere  yellow  waste,  even  the  murderous 
marshes  cracked  solid  and  dry  as  a  kiln.  "  The  sickness 
of  the  land,"  they  call  it,  and  now  it  is  any  irresponsible 
nobody  can,  with  one  lighted  firebrand,  send  broad  Central 
Africa  up  in  a  blaze.  Then,  too,  it  is  this  irresponsible 
nobody  is  overruled  ])y  a  responsible  Somebody,  who 
uses  this  beneficent  antiseptic  l)laze  to  purge  out  of 
His  own  Africa  everything  tliat  doth  offend,  from  sea 
to  sea. 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


249 


{1st  December.) 
To-day  I  tumbled  headlong  down  one  of  the  pitfalls  of 
Court  etiquette  by  daring  to  wear  a  pair  of  glasses.  An 
old  Mutoni  lectured  me  that  on  approaching  such  a  King 
of  Timbuctoo  a  strong  point  of  etiquette  is  to  doff,  not 
your  hat  but  your  spectacles,  for  such  a  man  is  called 
"  Mr.  Four-eyes "  and  is  a  horror.    So,  in  spite  of  any 
little  visual  defect,  you  must  climb  down  to  the  normal 
use  of  two  eyes,  not  four.    Nor  may  you  even  screw  a 
monocle  into  your  eye,  for  then  your  name  is  "  Mr.  One 
Eye "  (why  not  "  Mr.  Three "  ?).    The  method  in  this 
madness  is  a  real  peep  into  the  dark  chamber  of  the 
negro  brain,  for  he  detests  eye-glasses  with  a  reason. 
And  thus  it  runs.    In  Africa  you  must  not  only  set  a 
watch  upon  the  door  of  your  lips,  but  must  also  be 
inscrutably  careful  as  to  your  tell-tale  face,  for  with  the 
wary  eye  of  an  experienced  angler  the  African  can  easily 
fish  news  out  of  the  two  deep  liquid  pools  of  your  eye- 
balls.   To  him  eyes  speak  all  languages  under  the  sun, 
yea,  they  talk  better  than  tongues  ;  for  if  the  eye  says  one 
thing  and  the  tongue  another,  then  will  he  plump  for  the 
verdict  of  the  eye.    Hence  this  antipathy  to  "Mr.  Four- 
eyes."    To  don  these  glasses  before  a  chief  is  a  traitor's 
act,  for  are  you  not  thereby  putting  yourself  as  far  away 
from  his  ferret  eyes  as  you  are  bringing  him  nearer  to 
your  own  ?    The  insinuating  logic  of  the  thing  is  so 
convincing  that  you  frankly  own  up  to  having  been  un- 
pardonably  rude  in  wearing  spectacles.     What  could  be 

more  crushing  than  the  ancient  African  rule,  "  Distrust  a 
i6 


250  THINKING  BLACK 

man  that  cannot  look  ypu  in  the  face,  and  distrust  a 
woman  who  can  "  ? 

Instead  of  a  field-glass  or  eye-glass  firing  his  fancy, 
he  will  lecture  you  on  your  poor  eyesight,  and  rather 
ingeniously  argues  that  our  tallow  candles  and  oil  are  the 
cause  of  it  all.  God,  says  the  negro,  has  made  the  human 
eye  on  the  recuperative  system  of  a  long  dark  night  as 
ofiset  to  the  hard  white  glare  of  the  blazing  sun,  and 
every  sunset  God  draws  down  the  blinds  of  darkness. 
That  balmy  night  is  life's  surest  because  methodic  eye- 
salve.  Thus  it  is  that  for  centuries  the  negro  has  scored 
in  having  no  lucifer  matches  but  the  stars,  no  lamp  but 
the  moon,  his  reward  being  that,  matched  against  a  white 
man  in  the  woods,  the  spoilt  child  of  candles  and  lamps 
can  only  see  yards  for  the  African's  miles.  Call  this  the 
law  of  compensation  or  anything  you  like,  but  do  not  miss 
the  point  that  here  is  a  compensation  that  really  compen- 
sates. The  enforced  darkness  nurses  the  eye,  thus  pre- 
serving the  keen  edge  of  vision.  If  I  remember  rightly, 
did  not  Benjamin  Franklin  calculate  that  we  could  pay 
ofi"  the  national  debt  with  the  cost  of  candles  and  lamps 
that  would  be  saved  if  we  went  to  bed  at  sunset  and  got 
up  at  sunrise  ? 

Nor  is  this  all.  Our  sense  of  hearing  is  weakened 
likewise.  For,  seemingly,  we  Europeans  cannot  have  our 
omelette  of  civilisation  without  breaking  quite  a  number 
of  eggs,  and  our  handy  box  of  matches  and  our  candles  are 
merely  two  more  broken  eggs  for  tlic  omelette.  That  is 
to  say,  they  are  quickly  killing  out  of  us  all  the  old  savage 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES  251 


sense  of  quick  hearing.  True,  we  still  talk  about  "  cocking 
our  ears,"  but  in  the  dark  we  stupidly  scratch  a  match  to 
find  out  what  made  the  noise,  whereas  the  negro  having 
no  matches  must,  in  the  dark,  mxxke  his  ears  tell  him  all. 
The  drum  of  his  ear  is  both  match  and  candle,  and  in  the 
broad  racial  sense  the  negro  verily  has  his  reward.  For 
the  hundreds  of  night  sounds — rustlings,  twitterings, 
raspings,  tinglings,  and  roarings — are  all  known  to  even 
Africa's  tot,  the  ears  being  called  his  "  eyes  of  darkness." 

But  matches  are  a  boon,  notwithstanding,  and  there 
often  comes  the  painful  pinch  when  you  find  yourself 
benighted  without  a  kindly  lucifer  match.  In  these 
wilds  the  philanthropic  beam  of  a  farthing  candle  is  too 
high  an  aspiration,  but,  other  things  being  equal,  the 
native  can  always  produce  light  by  rubbing  his  fire-stick. 
Often  your  most  urgent  need  is  a  match  for  a  midnight 
alarm.  True,  we  have  plenty  of  electric  light,  when  the 
Lord  switches  it  on  in  the  sky  ;  and  many  a  good  turn 
it  has  done  me.  I  was  in  a  tight  corner  in  the  Sera 
plains  when  a  humble  lucifer  would  have  been  the  simple 
solution.  Black  clouds  had  rolled  up  from  the  far 
Kundelungu  range,  and  the  heavens  rang  with  the  loud 
artillery  of  thunder.  Then  the  lightning  began  to  fork 
and  flash.  Driven  into  a  deserted  hamlet  before  the 
advancing  deluge,  a  random  choice  of  a  hut  was  made — 
too  random,  alas !  for  the  thing  was  many  sizes  too  small 
for  one.  Only  just  in  the  nick  of  time,  for  growl  went 
the  bursting  thunder,  and  the  torrential  downpour  was 
upon  us.    Doubled  up  there  in  a  leaky  outhouse  with  an 


252 


THINKING  BLACK 


odd  flash  of  lightning  for  your  only  candle — oh  for  one 
of  Messrs.  Bryant  &  May's  best !  (Why  is  it  that  the 
African  says,  "Think  snake,  sight  snake"?)    A  sudden 

thought  came.    What  if  .    Just  then,  hiss,  went  the 

notorious  noise  of  an  unseen  "'mamba"  from  a  corner  of 
the  dark  den,  and  it's  oh,  indeed,  for  a  kindly  match  now, 
just  now.  My  heart  seemed  to  stop  for  repairs.  As 
though  this  longing  for  a  lucifer  had  actually  pressed  the 
invisible  button  of  an  electric-light  current,  flash !  came 
another  single  steel-blue  streak  of  lightning,  and  there, 
plain  as  a  pikestaff",  a  long  green  snake  showed  in  the 
flash  of  fire.  Atrociously,  maddeningly,  for  one  flashing 
moment,  I  sighted  my  co-occupant  of  the  den,  then,  back 
both  man  and  snake  were  hurled  into  the  blackness  of 
that  pestiferous  gloom.  Oh  for  a  kindly  lucifer  !  thought 
L  For  who  docs  not  know  that  a  snake  never  really 
attacks  a  man,  only  bites  out  of  fear,  and  only  because 
you  have  stumbled  over  him  in  error.  Need  I  say  that, 
as  that  mamba  blocked  the  doorway,  I  had  to  tear  down 
the  grass  wall  for  escape,  preferring  my  sheets  of  rain 
to  a  snake  under  the  other  sheets.  The  blackness  makes 
you  a  baby  in  helplessness,  therefore  a  baby's  fancies  and 
fears  flood  the  brain.  Small  wonder  the  negro  has  such 
a  sharp  sense  of  hearing,  the  slightest  sound  being  tell- 
tale :  "  the  sharpers,"  he  calls  the  ears,  and  surely  the 
reason  is  found  just  here  in  his  negro  life,  lacking  utterly 
the  adjunct  of  match  or  candle.  For  if  we  played-out 
Europeans  hear  a  noise,  then  straightway  must  we  blunt 
the  edge  of  our  sharp  ears  by  striking  a  light  to  decide 


BLACK  SUFFRAGETTES 


253 


the  cause.  Whereas  the  African's  ears  are  his  "  darkness- 
eyes,"  and  they  must  play  the  part  of  both  match  and 
candle.  This  auricular  sharpness  is  also  called  "  spiked 
ears,"  and  seemingly  our  so-called  spike  of  acute  hearing 
has  become  blunt,  because  it  thus  depends  on  sight  to 
solve  the  problems  of  sound.  This,  he  says,  is  the 
reason  why  God,  Who  divided  the  twenty-four  hours  into 
darkness  and  light,  also  divided  man  into  ears  and  eyes, 
the  correlatives  with  twelve  hours  apiece.  The  Faraday 
who  made  the  world  ring  with  his  Chemical  History  of 
a  Candle  would  most  surely  have  enjoyed  this  negro's 
lecture  on  "  The  Philosophy  of  a  Candle." 


CHAPTER  XIV 
Thus  Far  and  no  Farther 


"When  they  were  but  few  men  in  number;  yea, 
very  few,  and  strangers  in  it.  When  they  went  from 
one  nation  to  another  ...  He  suffered  no  man  to 
do  them  wrong;  yea,  He  reproved  kings  for  their 
sakes,  saying,  Touch  not  Mine  anointed,  and  do  My 
prophets  no  harm."  Psalm  cv.  12-15. 

•  *  *  ' 

"  Beneath  the  cross  of  Jesus 

I  fain  would  take  my  stand— 
The  shadow  of  a  mighty  rock 

Within  a  weary  land: 
A  home  within  the  wilderness, 

A  rest  upon  the  way, 
From  the  burning  of  the  noontide  heat 

And  the  burden  of  the  day." 


CHAPTER  XIV 


Thus  Far  and  no  Farther 

H€REIN  the  reader  painfully 
learns  that  a  tyrant  is  only  a  slave 
turned  inside  out. 

{2nd  December.) 

THE  King  disdained  my  salute  this  morning  ;  turned 
his  back  on  me  and  muttered  murder.  I  warrant 
you,  this  Mushidi  in  the  sulks  is  quite  a  dangerous 
item  in  our  programme.  Then  it  is  his  crafty  look  reveals 
potential  blood,  your  blood  and  nothing  short  of  it.  "  White 
men  ?  "  said  King  Cut-Throat  the  other  ominous  day  with 
disdain :  "  Oh,  out  East  near  Unyanyembe  we  killed 
several."  No  thought  pursues  me  so  persistently  as  this  : 
nag,  naggingly  does  it  try  to  gain  admittance  into  the  soul, 
the  old  David-in-the-dumps  whine  :  "I  shall  one  day  perish 
by  the  hand  of  Saul."  Those  murdered  whites  he  boasts 
of  were,  of  course,  poor  Carter  and  Cadenhead — a  touching 
talc  that,  if  all  were  knowu.  Carter,  an  Englishman  of 
great  ability  and  British  Consul  at  Bagdad,  one  day  burst 
on  astonished  Central  Africa  with  four  Indian  elephants. 
The  tale  of  his  triumphant  entry  is  a  thing  still  told  with 
bated  breath  far  into  th&  heart  of  Africa.  Livingstone 

S67 


258 


THINKING  BLACK 


and  Stanley  are  as  nobodies  compared  with  this  "  Lord  of 
Tuskers "  who  made  the  Rugarugas  marvel  at  the  sub- 
jugation of  such  monsters.    On  the  20th  of  October, 
behold !  the  triumphal  entry  of  these  four  white  men 
riding  their  pilot  elephant,  the  natives  all  amaze  and 
wondering  whether  they  are  mad  or  dreaming.  Never 
was  advance  guard  of  travelling  circus  acclaimed  by 
English  rustics  as  on  the  great  day  when  these  swarming 
negroes  saw  such  a  passing  strange  prodigy — a  whole 
tribe  struck  all  of  a  heap  and  stupefied !    Were  not 
elephants  the  local  terror  and  did  they  not  kill  many  a 
native  ?    Yet  it  is  one  of  the  ironies  of  contemporary 
history,  that  there,  stuck  high  on  that  elephant's  back, 
you  have  four  white  men  who  symbolise  the  coming 
struggle  for  supremacy — two  Belgians  and  two  English- 
men !    A  prophecy  of  history  you  can  certainly  call  it, 
for  who  is  the  second  Englishman  if  not  the  poor  ill-fated 
Stokes  ?    There  they  are,  rubbing  shoulders  on  the  back 
of  an  elephant,  Carter  and  Stokes  (English)  with  Popelin 
and  Van  den  Huvel  (Belgians).    Who  would  have  dared 
the  thought  that  one  day  a  Belgian  would  hang  that 
same  Stokes  on  a  forest  tree  in  the  wilds  of  Africa  ? 
With  pleasing  ignorance  and  charming  stupidity,  the 
negroes  never  dared  to  dream  that  those  four  whites  were 
not  one  in  nationality  and  fraternity,  and  had  they 
guessed  the  coming  rivalry  their  joy  would  have  known 
no  bounds.    But  long  before  Stokes  died  at  the  hands  of 
a  Belgian,  Carter  and  Cadenhead  fell  unwept  victims  to 
the  Rugarugas.    Hurrah  !  was  the  sliout  of  these  bandits 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  259 


on  the  20th  of  October,  and  the  following  25th  of  June 
saw  the  very  same  negroes  shrieking  death.  Yet  Carter 
in  his  death  is  even  more  famous  than  the  Carter  who 
petrified  Central  Africa  with  his  marvellous  Indian 
elephants.  Attacked  at  Pimbwe  on  the  23rd  June, 
Cadenhead  fell  dead  to  the  first  bullet.  Seeing  one  white 
man  dead,  their  150  Zanzibaris  fled,  leaving  Carter  alone 
to  face  the  murderers — no,  not  wholly  abandoned,  for  his 
faithful  mahouts  and  servant  Mahomed — honour  the 
brave ! — stuck  to  their  master.  Far  into  the  marshes  of 
Africa  they  still  tell  the  tale  of  that  brave  British  Consul 
who  sold  his  life  so  dearly,  and  even  the  Belgians  call  it 
"  une  sc^ne  terrible,  un  combat  digne  des  anciens  heros." 
Seventeen  times  his  Winchester  speaks,  and  seventeen  men 
lie  dead.  But  this  is  not  all.  The  carbine  cartridges  are 
now  finished,  but  with  a  defiance  born  of  desperation  he 
falls  back  on  his  revolver,  the  circle  of  fire  narrowing  in 
on  him — a  pack  of  howling  wild  beasts.  Of  course,  they 
too  could  shoot,  and  indeed,  quite  early  in  the  fight,  a 
bullet  had  pinned  poor  Carter  to  the  ground,  the  warning 
this,  that  escape  is  now  impossible.  Seeing  death  ahead, 
he  coolly  and  carefully  pulled  out  his  watch,  wrote  a 
farewell  note,  and  begged  Mahomed  to  make  off  with  his 
papers  to  Karema.  Tlien,  after  making  good  practice  with 
his  revolver  for  some  time,  "  death  and  he  lay  down  to- 
gether," as  the  murderers  say.  Nor  do  they  blush  to  tell  me 
how  they  mutilated  the  poor  body  witli  revolting  cruelty. 

So  tlicre  you  have  the  meaning  of  Musliidi's  dark  hint 
to  us  :  "  Whites  ?    Oh,  we  killed  several." 


260 


THINKING  BLACK 


(Later.) 

I  thought  I  knew  my  Mushidi  fairly  intimately,  but 
to-day  he  quite  nonplussed  me  by  spitting  in  my  face. 
In  a  flash,  I  thought  that  here  was  a  chance  to  share  in 
the  suflFerings  of  Christ :  did  they  not  spit  in  That  Face 
from  Which  one  day  the  heavens  and  the  earth  shall 
flee  away  ?  But  a  tardy  explanation  of  this  foolery 
was  so  suave  and  conciliating  that  I  soon  saw  that  I 
had  lost  martyrdom.  That  spit  was  not  a  mere 
expectoration  but  a  compliment ;  not  a  spit,  in  fact,  but  a 
spout,  for  his  mouth  was  full  of  beer,  not  holy  water  but 
holy  beer.  Well,  it  seems  that  I  had  caught  him  in  the 
spirit  of  worship  which  in  Africa  also  means  the  worship 
of  spirits  by  the  drinking  of  beer.  This  worshipping 
(Kupara)  literally  means  a  spitting  or  spouting,  and  when 
they  have  spouted  consecrated  beer  down  into  the  ground, 
they  then  start  and  link  up  the  living  and  the  dead  by 
spouting  beer  all  around  the  place.  This  arrangement 
harmonises  exactly  with  the  negro's  ideas  of  fellowship  in 
dirty  doings,  and  an  Englishman  would  need  to  wear  a 
waterproof  and  an  umbrella  at  such  a  function.  It  really 
rains  beer.  Moreover,  this  curious  custom  of  worshipping 
the  spirits  with  a  drink  called  "  spirits  "  is  very  subtle,  the 
hint  seeming  to  be  in  the  fact  that  a  fainting,  half-dead 
man  can  be  vivified  by  such  a  drink.  But  the  river  of 
time  is  indeed  brackish  with  the  salt  of  human  tears,  and 
here  is  Mushidi  crouching  to  the  spirits  and  pleading  their 
aid  at  the  very  moment  when  he  is  surrounded  by  the 
accusing  bleached  skulls  of  his  victims.    Yet,  "  nobody 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  261 


really  dies "  is  the  negro  saying,  so  to  him  that  white 
skull  is  merely  the  last  surviving  wind-swept  room  of  a 
wrecked  tenement.  Now  only  a  warrior's  punch-bowl,  the 
very  skull  that 

"  was  once  ambition's  airy  hall, 
The  dome  of  thought,  the  palace  of  the  soul." 

Nevertheless,  if  you  want  to  guess  even  faintly  at  the 
curious  convolutions  of  the  black  brain,  you  must  seize 
upon  this  great  system  of  spirit-worship,  which  is  one  and 
indivisible  across  Africa.  The  whole  theory  is  merely  the 
solemn  result  of  the  negro  as  a  race  looking  steadfastly 
into  the  continents  of  death  and  eternity.  What  is  this 
fiction  but  a  farrago  of  sense  and  nonsense  ?  The  ardent 
spirits  of  the  living  and  the  dead  linked  with  these  ardent 
spirits — of  beer.  Worshipping  by  fits  and  starts  and 
sometimes  only  once  per  annum,  the  negro  can  only 
cordially  dispense  with  worship  after  he  has  dispensed 
cordials.  Do  not  they  accuse  us  of  the  same  thing  when 
we  place  wine  on  the  Lord's  Table  ? 

*  *  # 

But  there  is  more  in  it  than  mere  tipple — tragedy,  call 
it.  Watch  this  African's  definition  of  spirit-worship,  a 
sorry  enough  solution  of  the  problem.  Here  it  is.  Shut 
up  into  one  sentence  the  kernel  idea  is  the  negro  attempt 
to  rob  the  awful  and  unknown  spirit-world  of  its  double 
sting  of  loneliness  and  frowning  distance.  Does  it  not 
envelop  him,  and  out  from  the  unseen  depths  thereof  arc 
not  daily  darts  showered  against  him  ?  Hence  his  solu- 
tion in  this  bridging  process,  i.e.  the  boast  that  a  de- 


262 


THINKING  BLACK 


ceased  mother  is  still  linked  with  her  living  children 
by  the  very  blood  she  has  bequeathed  them.  That  is  to 
say,  yonder  in  that  frowning  lonely  spirit-world,  menacing 
his  life  at  every  turn,  he  has  actually  a  blood  kinsman  as 
daysman  and  representative.  She,  too,  was  once  hungry, 
once  weary,  once  jagged  with  earthly  pains  and  penalties. 
To  prove  this  link  as  both  intimate  and  dear  I  have 
heard  a  man  murmur  in  spirit-worship,  "  Oh,  mother, 
behold  this  blood  now  coursing  in  my  body,  thou  didst 
not  merely  bequeath  it  unto  me,  but  it  is  thee  !  "  Here, 
then,  you  find  the  tenacity  of  belief  that  he,  the  living 
being,  can  bridge  the  awful  gulf  because  the  dead  did 
not  entirely  die — did  they  not  leave  some  of  their  own 
literal  blood  on  this  earthly  side  of  the  gulf  as  an  in- 
tentional link  ?  There,  then,  is  his  bridge  across  the 
chasm,  and  if  you  urge  that  it  is  not  real,  but  merely  his 
own  mad  conjecture,  he  will  retort  that  the  bridging 
initiative  was  not  his  at  all,  but  rather  that  of  his  own 
guardian  spirit,  who  will  not  [because  cannot)  sever  the 
link  between  the  living  and  the  dead.  Instance,  even 
a  tiny  boy,  who,  long  ago  in  war,  was  swooped  down 
on  in  his  natal  village — query  :  How  can  he  worship  a 
mother  he  never  knew  ?  The  boy's  retort  is  that,  albeit 
he  was  so  torn  away  at  birth  from  his  unknown  mother, 
yet  surely  he,  too,  was  born  as  much  as  everybody  else. 
That  he  never  knew  her  is  less  than  nothing  at  all  to 
him,  for  he  has  only  to  pinch  his  flesh  to  remind  himself 
that  she  gave  him  this  body.  So  there  he  is,  working 
away  at  the  building  of  his  little  temple  to  the  "  unknown 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  263 

god  " — his  nameless  mother's  spirit.  For  although 
unknown  yet  is  she  well-known,  yea,  here  is  her  own 
blood  flowing  in  his  own  veins.  Hence  the  double 
deduction  he  makes  that,  even  in  the  spirit-world,  throb 
for  throb  of  his  earthly  joy  is  hers,  even  as  stab  for  stab 
of  his  pain  is  hers  too.  It  is  all  "mother,"  "mother," 
mark  you,  and  no  mention  of  his  father,  for  often  he  does 
not  know  his  name,  and  just  as  often — hush  !  the  mother 
knows  it  not  either. 

And  so  he  "  bridges  the  gulf."  For  does  he  not  believe 
that  in  every  pang  that  rends  his  heart  his  guardian 
spirit  has  a  part  ?  The  victim  of  many  a  cruel  and  un- 
generous blow  in  life,  does  he  not  still  reckon  on  the  dear 
old  maternal  solicitude  for  his  welfare  ?  God,  he  thinks, 
is  too  busy  up  among  the  stars  to  bother  about  him,  but 
not  so  his  "  mama."  Watch  the  subtlety  of  all  this,  for 
like  a  dam  of  rocks  relentlessly  solid,  here  is  a  barrier 
ever  blocking  the  advance  of  the  Gospel.  To  preach 
Christ  as  kinsman-advocate  before  God  is  to  the  negro 
only,  in  other  words,  a  branch  of  the  same  spirit-worship. 
Wearied  by  the  well  of  Sychar,  thirsty  on  life's  road, 
and  pained  with  the  pangs  of  suff'ering,  does  He  not  now 
sorrow  with  us  in  our  sorrow  ?  Poor  old  African,  groping 
after,  if  haply  he  may  find.  The  only  way  he  hopes  to 
capture  the  stronghold  of  The  Unseen  is  by  this  flank 
movement  of  kinsmanship — to  liini  the  line  of  least 
resistance,  being  the  warm,  cherishing  heart  of  his  defunct 
mother.  0  for  ten  tliousaud  Christians  to  advance  in 
the  Lord's  name  and  shout  to-night  above  all  the  wintry 


264  THINKING  BLACK 

winds  of  Africa  :  "I  am  the  way."  It  is  easy  to  talk 
loosely  of  the  Gospel  of  Nature  softening  men's  hearts, 
but  Paul  agrees  with  Tennyson's  "  Nature  red  in  tooth 
and  claw "  when  he  says  that  "  the  whole  creation 
groaneth  and  travaileth  together  in  pain  until  now." 
And  it  is  precisely  this  moan  pouring  into  the  negro  ear 
that  makes  him  think  of  God  as  a  malignant  demon, 
mocking  at  his  pain,  and  pouring  contempt  upon  his 
life.  The  impassive  serenity  of  Nature  in  all  the  struggles 
and  anguish  of  life  maddens  him  into  open  revolt,  for 
do  not  the  serene  stars  rise  and  set  with  callous  calmness 
over  the  storm  and  stress  of  his  life  ?  There  is  the  Gospel 
of  Nature  for  you  !  Moral :  Herein  is  love  :  not  that  we 
get  to  love  God  by  looking  out  on  cruel  Nature,  but  that 
He  loved  us  and  gave  His  Son  a  Victim  of  the  same 
cruelty. 

{Srd  December.) 
Have  just  had  a  "borderland"  talk  with  an  old  devil- 
doctor,  and  he  tells  me  much  about  his  professional 
headquarters.  Away  down  the  Lualaba  the  natives 
have  located  their  "  Cathedral  of  the  Congregated  Dead  " 
in  a  dark,  umbrageous  ravine.  Their  idea  is  that  for 
hundreds  of  miles  around  the  spirits  all  concentrate  into 
this  weird  amphitheatre  of  the  dead  :  "  Chivawa,"  they 
call  the  mysterious  place,  and  dead  bodies  scattered  far 
over  hill  and  dale  in  their  graves — or  no  grave  at  all — 
have  each  a  representative  spirit  here  in  their  Parliament 
of  the  Dead.  "  The  spot  where  spirits  blend "  is  tlieir 
phrase,  l)ut  tlic  blending  is  in  loud  debate  when  the 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  265 


demons  shriek  out  invectives.  In  this  Assembly  there  is 
no  President  or  Mr.  Speaker,  and  the  logic  of  these  demon 
utterances  is  so  illogical  that  the  Lubans  have  seemingly 
broken  into  the  spirit-world  at  the  lunatic  asylum  end. 
Distinctly  Dantesque  is  this  gulf  of  theirs,  the  very  look 
of  the  place  suggesting  uncanny,  supernatural  notions. 
Reluctant  daylight  only  trickles  in  here  and  there  through 
the  mountain  fissures,  and  as  Nature  has  such  a  very 
definite  voice  to  the  negro,  why  wonder  that  they  all 
seem  to  hear  her  proclaim  the  special  sanctity  of  this  wild, 
woeful  region  ?  "  Dim  religious  light "  with  a  caution. 
The  acoustics  of  the  place  are  so  wonderful  that  a  mere 
whisper  is  caught  up  and  goes  echoing  on  and  on  through 
the  galleries  and  corridors  of  the  mountain.  When  I 
passed  down  there  a  wet  wind  was  blowing  bleak,  and  the 
noise  came  groaning  out  from  the  Cathedral  entrance  like 
a  huge  organ.  Far  from  being  a  mere  thing  of  con- 
temporary gossip,  this  Chivawa  (like  its  sister- 
cathedral  Songa  farther  South)  is  the  High  Court  of 
Appeal  in  all  tough  lawsuits — its  yea  utterly  yea,  and  its 
nay,  nay.  After  wrangling  out  hot  legal  puzzles  in  their 
hot  little  hamlets,  the  final  word  cannot  be  said  until 
Messrs.  Pro  and  Con  go  ofi"  on  their  hundred  miles 
tramp  to  throw  themselves  for  adjudication  at  the  feet  of 
these  mighty  dead.  "  The  plunge  into  darkness  "  is  what 
this  sort  of  legal  gaml)ling  is  called.  The  old  vein  of 
incipient  flippancy  is  now  gone  utterly,  and  there  these 
negroes  lie  prostrate  in  suspen.se.  He  who  awakes  out  of 
his  swoon  to  find  himself  beplastered  with  white  chalk— 


266  THINKING  BLACK 

let  the  welkin  ring,  for  he  is  justified.  He  who,  per 
contra,  finds  himself  covered  with  charcoal  must  himself 
die  the  death  by  fire  and  become  charcoal.  With  all  this 
rival-religion  idea  of  theirs,  how  hard  it  is  to  persuade 
such  a  superstitious  people  that  the  best  way  to  see  Divine 
Light  is  to  put  out  their  own  farthing  candle !  Yet  these 
negroes  laugh  when  you  tell  them  of  the  prisoner  into 
whose  cell  the  light  came  through  a  little  crack  in  the 
wall.  And  one  day,  when  they  came  to  destroy  the  wall, 
he  bitterly  lamented  because  it  would  destroy  the  crack 
through  which  his  daylight  came.  Our  message  rings 
out  one  note,  and  one  only  :  "  See  thy  Sin,  but  behold 
thy  Saviour." 

One  rarely  seen  old  man  has  a  great  say  here : 
Kavoto,  they  call  him,  a  weird  old  magic-magnate  who 
has  made  the  whole  land  hum  with  his  dark  doings  among 
the  lions.  But  how  can  we  distinguish  the  bones  of  fact 
from  the  drapery  of  invention  ?  The  cum  g^^ano  story 
runs  that  from  far  and  near  he  summons  his  lions  to 
receive  their  fetish  orders  ;  no  doors  locked  in  his  forest 
hamlet,  and  they  trot  in  and  out  like  friendly  mastiffs. 
At  sundown,  he  sends  out  this  "  lion-call,"  a  rumbling  roar 
simulating  their  cry,  and  in  they  bowl  to  supper.  Then 
it  is  they  are  commissioned  N.,  S.,  E.,  and  W.  to  raid 
villages  and  pick  off  the  various  victims  of  his  hate, 
"  orders  "  being  received  at  this  Lion  Depot  and  carefully 
executed.  That  is  to  say,  A.  deposits  a  sum  in  Kavoto's 
hand  for  the  murdering  of  B.  by  lions,  and  the  specialist 
guarantees   results.    The   old  map-makers   were  right 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  267 


when,  in  lieu  of  any  known  name  to  print  over  this  spot  in 
Africa,  they  put  down  the  eloquent  prophecy  :  Hie  sunt 
Leones.  Who  told  them  of  this  Lion  Bureau  ?  The 
two  mild-mannered  chiefs  who  to-day  vouched  for  these 
strange  doings  seemed  greatly  pained  when  I  hinted  that 
this  sort  of  thing  could  not  be  accepted  without  a  certain 
amount  of  intellectual  jugglery.  They  repelled  my 
insinuations  with  real  Luban  scorn,  and  to  convince  me, 
one  of  them  flew  off  like  a  rocket  extolling  the  Lion 
King's  occult  powers :  proof  after  proof*  he  brought 
into  his  oration  ;  grand  words  to  express  poor  ideas,  a 
racehorse  drawing  a  donkey-cart.  Yet  very  sure  am  I, 
Herodotus  would  have  filled  pages  with  just  such  trash. 

What  does  it  all  mean  ?  Is  not  all  the  world  under 
one's  waistcoat  ?  Well,  deducting  adequate  discount 
only  leaves  a  little  balance — but  much  in  that  little. 
For  all  Africa  believes  in  the  transmigration  of  a  livinsr 
man  into  a  living  lion,  believes  that  lions  lend  their 
bodies  to  human  beings  for  the  inhuman  purpose  of 
grabbing  their  fellows.  This  Kavoto  knows,  and  this 
he  capitalises.  Hence  this  opening  of  a  Lion  Shop — 
Transmigration  Specialist,  wonders  while  you  wait.  Pay 
your  money  and  pick  your  victim,  for  does  not  the  name 
Kavoto  mean,  the  Lurker-to-kill  ?  Even  far-off  white 
men,  white  dal^blers  in  the  black  iirt,  liave  been  reported 
to  pay  eagerly  for  the  death  of  a  victim  ;  Arabs,  of  course, 
being  regular  customers.  Worse  and  higher  still,  it  is 
said — well,  never  mind  what  is  said. 

J  n ? ? ? ?? 

17 


268  THINKING  BLACK 

{3rd  December.) 
I  have  just  had  a  big  brawl  with  M.  over  refusing 
to  write  out  to  the  Ocean  for  more  powder  and  guns. 
The  old  days  of  the  poisoned  arrow  are  passing,  and 
something  with  a  big  bang  is  the  substitute.  The  lion 
pulls  down  the  zebra  in  the  moonlight,  the  leopard 
springs  on  the  antelope,  and,  says  Mushidi,  why  not  the  big 
man  versus  the  little  man  in  the  war  of  extermination  ? 
"  These  were  my  claws,"  said  he  to-day,  pointing  to  some 
old  bows  and  poisoned  arrows  of  the  early  days.  With 
the  innovation  of  "  Waterloo  "  flint-locks  and  "Crimea" 
cap-guns,  of  course,  the  execution  has  become  more 
drastic  and  decisive.  When  Mushidi  got  his  first  guns  of 
the  "gas-pipe"  genus,  then  it  was  he  really  conceived  his 
"  God  "  pretensions  ;  was  not  that  flash  in  the  pan  of  his 
flint-locks  followed  by  the  roar  from  the  barrel  a  true 
copy  of  the  Almighty's  thunder  and  lightning  ?  But  he 
bemoaned  the  paucity  of  these  "  God-firers."  His  nuoleal 
armoury  indeed  only  boasted  the  grand  total  of  five  flint- 
locks, and — like  the  small  boy's  five  loaves  of  life — what 
were  these  five  guns  of  death  among  so  many  negroes  to 
be  slain  ?  Thus  Mushidi  moaned,  and  the  moaning 
climaxed  in  a  midnight  council,  with  the  hatching  of  a 
famous  miracle-lie.  And  thus  "the  gun-lie"  ran.  Out 
among  the  unsophisticated  negroes  the  heresy  was 
preached  that  Mushidi  had  not  merely  omnipotent  guns 
but  omniscient  bullets.  In  other  words,  they  were  stuffed 
with  nonsense  that  he  or  his  delegate,  by  merely  drawing 
a  gun-trigger  at  random  could  thereby  send  the  said 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  269 


omniscient  bullet,  sure  as  the  scent  of  a  blood-hound, 
zigzagging  through  the  land,  dealing  death  to  all  desir- 
able victims.  More  :  they  made  a  double  lie  out  of 
double  bullets ;  two  bullets  like  two  pills  being  a  double 
dose  of  death,  the  said  bullets  separating  to  find 
different  victims  ad  infinitum.  Superstition  dies  hard,  but 
here  in  Bunkeya  it  doesn't  die  at  all.  So  well  does  this 
idea  of  "  God-firing "  soak  into  the  negro  brain,  that 
when  I  was  down  in  the  Lufira  Valley  the  King's  brother 
corroborated  this  idea.  He  had  gone  out  into  the 
savannah  to  try  his  Bivanga  or  luck  at  hunting  a  herd 
of  red-buck  round  the  ant-hills ;  but  when  he  had  hoped 
to  draw  upon  one  of  these  decisively,  flash  !  came  a  vivid 
fork  of  lightning,  half  blinding  him  for  the  moment.  A 
second  passed,  and  then  he  saw  nearly  the  whole  heap  of 
buck  lying  stone  dead  from  the  forked  flash.  Then  it 
was,  rubbing  his  hands  with  glee,  the  noble  hunter 
naively  said,  "  Fancy  !  God  beating  me  at  gun-firing  !  " 

It  was  with  this  blasphemous  idea  he  pushed  liis 
"  God "  pretensions  in  Lubaland  on  going  North  to 
Kayumba's.  The  legend  of  Kara  ya  Rova  found  all  over 
the  Garenganze  took  Mushidi's  fancy.  This  Kara  ya 
Rova  is  the  legendary  Creator  of  the  Human  Race,  called 
literally  the  Captain  of  Humanity,  and  he  it  w\as  who 
headed  for  the  North  with  the  long  Indian  file  of  human 
nations  in  his  wake.  We,  the  whites,  were  there  with 
our  federal  ancestor,  and  they,  the  blacks,  were  there  too. 
But  spying  on  the  march,  day  by  day,  a  changing 
panorama  of  bewitching  vales  watered  by  noble  rivers, 


270  THINKING  BLACK 

they  one  by  one  dropped  out  and  turned  aside  to  a  lazy 
lotus  life  in  Africa.  We,  tli6  hardier  whites,  held  on  our 
Northern  way  until  we  were  dropped  in  our  respective 
habitats.  Pointing  to  the  mountains,  they  show  you 
solemnly  his  alleged  "  footprints "  in  the  rocks,  for  in 
those  days,  say  our  good  black  geologists,  "  the  rocks  were 
soft."  These  footprints,  of  course,  are  a  fraud  and  merely 
the  "pot-holes"  common  to  all  the  world's  river-beds, 
erosive  in  character ;  nevertheless,  it  was  appropriate  that 
this  "  footprints-graven-in-the-rocks "  idea  should  catch 
]\Iushidi's  imagination.  Deceiving  and  being  deceived, 
humbugging  and  being  humbugged  his  whole  life,  it  was 
in  the  essential  irony  of  things  that  he,  The  Fraud,  should 
believe  such  a  fraud.  The  conscious  grower  of  a 
mctaphoric  mushroom  empire,  he  vainly  longed  to  go 
down  to  posterity  at  least  "  written  in  the  rocks,"  if  not 
with  the  iron  pen  of  history  :  was  not  he,  too,  "  God  "  as 
much  as  Kara  ya  Rova  ?  Did  not  he,  too,  daily  and 
hourly  mould  the  fates  and  fortunes  of  men  ?  So  the  fiat 
went  forth,  and  Mushidi,  standing  as  solemnly  as  though 
he  were  being  measured  by  a  shoemaker,  got  his  foot- 
prints carved  out  of  the  rocks.  More  than  that,  he  had  a 
backgammon  board  cut  out  in  the  rocks — a  memorial 
to  all  generations. 

Here  it  was  at  Kayumba's  he,  resolving  to  make  a 
water-bottle  never  before  made  by  man,  flayed  a  human 
being  to  make  a  water-bottle  of  the  skin.  Hence  the 
catch  has  gone  down  to  posterity,  "  Alushidi  wa  funda 
mu  ku  funda  muntu,"  the  horrible  play  on  the  word 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  271 


funda  being  that  it  mcaus  doubly  "to  teach"  and  "to 
take  the  skin  off,"  just  as,  in  a  weaker  sense,  a  master 
beating  his  slave  will  pun  on  the  same  word  to  say,  "  I 
will  teach  you,"  i.e.  I  will  beat  you  till  some  skin  comes 
off.  This  skin  of  a  human  being  is  most  touchingly 
called  *'  the  seamless  robe,"  the  idea  being  that  when  God 
created  man  He  clothed  him  with  a  seamless  robe  of  skin. 
Little  wonder  that  the  memory  of  the  other  sacred 
seamless  robe  of  Calvary  came  to  me  very  vividly  in 
almost  an  exactly  similar  connection  as  the  story  of  the 
Roman  soldiers  gambling  for  Christ's  robe.  There,  too, 
in  Mushidi's  capital  were  four  cut-throats,  with  red 
turkey-twill  turbans,  who  had  returned  from  a  fight  in  the 
North,  Swooping  down  on  the  town,  they  had  killed  off 
most  of  the  men,  dragging  South  the  women  and  boys 
as  slaves,  and  here  you  have  four  soldiers  with  only  one 
slave  between  them.  Moot-point :  What  is  to  be  done  ? 
Why,  of  course,  Teya  Buvale,  or  throw  the  dice,  for 
ultimate  ownership.  So  there,  behold  them  gambling 
for  a  slave,  and  now  it  is  in  the  excited  gabble  of  the 
gamblers  you  can  overhear  the  snatch-phrases,  "  Let  us 
gamble  for  our  seamless  robe,"  i.e.  a  human  being.  But 
on  pushing  investigations  you  find  that  while  this  is 
literally  a  metaphor  for  the  actual  skin,  yet  as  a  "  whole 
skin  "  even  in  English  means  a  live  body,  even  so  there 
is  a  double  innuendo  in  Bantu.  For  the  seamless  robe  of 
skin  is  to  the  negro  a  type  of  the  unity  of  that  slave's 
body  who  could  not  be  cut  up  into  four  portions  to 
accommodate  the  four  warrior.i,  hence  tliis  gambling  :  "  Let 


272 


THINKING  BLACK 


us  not  rend  it,  but  cast  lots  for  it,  whose  it  shall  be."  As 
not  even  a  bone  of  Christ's  body  was  broken,  how  sug- 
gestive the  fate  of  both  His  robe  of  cloth  and  robe  of  flesh  ! 

But  there  is  a  glimmer  in  all  this  gloom.  In  the 
darkest  den  of  Africa,  the  doctrine  of  the  Immortality 
of  the  Soul  is  flaming  like  a  fire,  and  the  deeper  you 
dig  the  higher  it  flares.  Bipeds  only,  too,  the  door  being 
slammed  on  quadrupeds.  Bird  or  beast,  do  not  dare 
suggest  to  the  Luban  that  animals  are  immortal.  Here  is 
a  whole  town  actually  gone  ofi"  its  food  and  solidly  refusing 
to  eat  until  new.  con.  they  come  to  a  decision  on  a  ques- 
tion of — of  metaphysics.  'Tis  passing  strange.  When 
I  came  on  the  scene  they  had  been  at  it  for  four  hours, 
the  debate  a  wild  thing  :  Has  a  dog  a  spirit  ? 

The  judges  were  in  the  blues  when  I  arrived,  and  in- 
sisted on  my  umpiring  their  hard-mouthed  wrangle.  The 
older  folks  stamp  with  indignation  at  the  insolent  idea, 
and  the  Freethinker  who  set  this  ball  a-rolling  is  having 
it  hot,  the  heretic  !  At  last  they  have  nonplussed  him,  for 
he  lamely  confesses  that,  of  course,  dogs  as  a  rule  are — 
well — only  dogs,  a  species  of  local  canine  mutton,  that  is 
to  say,  but  this  dreadful  dog  was — w-a-s,  a  wonder.  The 
whole  debate,  it  seems,  masks  the  mouth  of  a  trap,  a 
lawyer's  trap,  and  a  law-suit  is  lurking  in  the  background 
all  the  time.  For  if  he  can  successfully  insinuate  that  an 
exceptional  dog  may  (ahem  !)  exceptionally  have  a  spirit, 
then  he  is  going  to  have  the  law  on  them,  for  he  avers  a 
dead  dog  is  haunting  him  to  his  undoing.  This  dog,  be 
it  keenly  noted,  was  not  only  a  hunter's  dog  but  really  a 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  273 


greater  hunter  than  his  master.  Day  by  day,  it  would 
go  off  on  its  own,  lurk  on  the  edge  of  the  plain  and,  with 
the  spring  of  a  panther,  drag  down  an  antelope,  a  devoted 
gift  to  his  master.  This  entente  cordiale,  between  man 
and  dog,  went  on  and  on,  until  the  neighbours  envied  both 
man  and  dog  ;  so  one  day — dark  dies  memorahilis — they 
pounced  on  the  hunter,  claiming  damages  for  a  slight 
indiscretion  on  the  animal's  part — breach  of  dog-etiquette, 
I  mean,  not  man's.  Stealing  eggs,  nothing  less,  was  the 
accusation.  Result :  the  culprit  pug  was  condemned  to 
have  his  ears  cropped,  and  with  the  disappearance  of  the 
devoted  dog's  ears  there  also  disappeared  utterly  any 
devoted  gifts  of  game.  Knotty  point :  When  he  lost  his 
ears,  did  he  lose  his  scent  for  game  ?  Answer :  No,  not 
at  all ;  he  went  still  at  it,  was  still  successful  in  the  chase, 
but — but  snubbed  his  master  for  permitting  them  to  crop 
ears.  Did  he  eat  his  captured  game  then  ?  Certainly 
not ;  how  could  a  dog  with  such  a  prohibition  bred  in  the 
bone,  how  could  it  dare  such  a  deed  ? 

This,  then,  is  what  it  did  do — and  here  it  is  we  tumble 
plump  into  mystery.  Adjacent  to  the  townlet  is  a  wild 
bog  into  which  the  Lualaba  lavishes  its  waters,  the  dense 
tangle  being  hoi)eless  and  shutting  in  the  water  from  view. 
Here  it  is  the  dog  discovers  a  hole  for  hiding  his  trophies. 
Day  by  day  (it  all  came  out  afterwards)  he  revengefully 
rammed  down  that  hole  his  spoils  of  the  chase,  a  real  case 
— if  you  but  change  one  word — of  "  a  dog  in  the  manger"  ; 
he  didn't  eat  the  meat  himself  out  of  canine  honour,  and 
he  slyly  saw  to  it  that  nobody  else  would.    Then  came 


274 


Thinking  BLAcit 


(what  should  have  been)  the  end,  but  the  end  is  not  yet. 
Poor  Bow-wow  died,  died  of-  chagrin,  some  said ;  died  of 
disdain,  said  others.  And  now  trouble  begins  to  fall  thick 
and  fast  among  the  hunter's  friends.  You  remember  that 
hole  in  the  dark  bog  and  you  recall  how  the  dog  frequented 
the  spot ;  well,  that  hole,  the  folks  say,  is  an  endless  shaft 
that  leads  down  to  the  bottomless  pit  of  the  demons. 
This  man's  brother,  at  any  rate,  went  there  one  day,  broke 
through  the  thick  papyrus  down  to  the  water,  a  huge 
crocodile  snapped  up  at  him  and  down  he  went  with  a 
shriek — yes,  down  the  dead  dog's  hole.  At  home,  too,  in 
the  village,  it  is  the  same  thing,  death  after  death  ;  illness 
after  illness,  and  all  dogging  the  hunter's  kinsfolk  who 
betrayed  the  dog.  So  here  you  have  the  whole  story  of 
this  wrangle,  but  the  town  stops  its  ears  and  denies  that 
a  dog  with  no  spirit  can  haunt  the  living.  The  only 
haunting  a  dog  does  locally  is  a  slight  canine  indigestion 
after  they  have  swallowed  him. 

So  here  once  more  tlie  old  idea  is  proved  that  im- 
mortality is  not  a  mere  doctrine  but  an  instinct,  a  much 
more  serious  thing.  Grotesque  and  diversified  in  its 
million  manifestations,  no  doubt,  but  a  notorious  instinct, 
and  as  such  sure,  yes,  surer  than  the  instinct  of  the  bird 
of  passage  never  deceived  in  its  migrations.  Sure  as  the 
bee  when  it  elaborates  the  cell  for  the  future  honey. 
Sure,  yes,  surer  far  than  that  instinct  of  the  butterfly  and 
beetle  when  they  prepare  the  cradle  and  the  food  for  the 
ofispring  they  will  never  see.  Even  Darwin  was  forced 
to  own  the  vast  ramifications  of  this  instinct  of  Immor- 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  275 

tality  among  degraded  races  of  men,  but  curiously  argued 
that  "  if  the  human  mind  was  developed  from  the  lowest 
form  of  creatures,  then  how  could  that  mind — human 
though  it  was — be  trusted  in  its  instincts  ?  "  Of  course, 
the  bewildering  part  of  all  this  is  that  the  speaker  is  the 
same  Darwin  who  sees  elsewhere  instinct  as  a  mighty 
guiding  law  ruling  the  creation  like  clockwork,  and  un- 
erringly causing  the  swallow,  for  instance,  to  shoot  South 
overseas  for  the  sure  sunshine  and  the  flowers.  Not  by 
whim  or  caprice,  but  by  law — the  law  of  instinct — does 
that  swallow  dart  South  to  the  sun.  Then,  Mr.  Darwin, 
why  deny  to  the  mighty  soul  what  you  grant  to  the 
small  swallow  ?  Are  ye  not  of  more  value  than  many 
swallows  ?  Moral :  The  thirst  for  the  Infinite  proves  the 
Infinite.  "  Sir,  I  hold,"  said  Emerson — and  well  spake 
he— "I  hold  that  God  Who  keeps  His  Word  with  the 
birds  and  fishes  in  all  their  migratory  instincts  will  keep 
His  word  with  man." 

(Later.) 

Mushidi  was  very  meek  and  mikl  to-day  as  he 
received  some  bold  blacksmiths  from  the  South-East. 
They  have  him  wholly  in  the  hollow  of  their  hand  :  no 
smith,  no  soldier — no  Tubal  Cain,  no  sword  or  plough- 
share ! 

The  best  because  busiest  bees  in  the  hive  of  Central 
Africa  are  these  tough  old  blacksmiths  who  turn  out  the 
iron  ore.  Long  bony  hands  they  have  on  which  the 
muscles  stand  out  like  whipcords.  Made  not  of  flesh 
and  blood,  but  of  asbestos,  these  funny  fingers  of  theirs 


276  THINKING  BLACK 

can  juggle  with  live  coals  of  fire  and  scarcely  be  burned, 
hence  the  common  conceit  is  to  call  their  iBngers  "  Fire- 
tongs"  (Fimanto).  There  is  poetry  in  these  brawny 
blacks,  but  they  live  their  poetry  like  men  instead  of 
singing  it  like  birds,  and  far  and  near  they  surely  have 
their  reward.  All  eyes  look  East,  Kishinga  way,  when 
the  roar  of  the  rains  is  near.  Are  not  those  hundreds  of 
miles  of  smiling  African  tillage  all  traceable  to  this  man 
who  digs  the  ore  from  the  hillside  and  manufactures 
hoes,  spears  and  axes  ?  Although  their  ideas  are  the 
crudest  of  the  crude,  still  they  combine  in  a  solemn  cult 
the  caste  of  Tubal  Cain,  let  us  call  it.  Bound  by  a  code 
of  stringent  laws,  these  "  thou-shalt-nots  "  are  a  pathetic 
mix-up  of  soul  and  matter,  faith  and  works,  mud  and 
stars.  They  are  sworn  to  temporal  celibacy  and  severely 
dieted  ;  can  only  eat  out  of  certain  pots,  and  cannot,  dare 
not,  eat  certain  animals — e.g.  the  hare.  Their  furnaces 
make  quite  a  show  of  hard  enterprise,  and  the  function  of 
filling  these  is  the  occasion  of  a  solemn  fast  when  no  soul 
of  man  other  than  these  sons  of  Tubal  Cain  can  be  about. 
Then  it  is  all  the  folks  shut  themselves  indoors  while  this 
"  furnace-feeding  "  process  is  going  on,  the  men  of  the  cult 
calling  out  menacingly  the  while.  But  as  most  things  in 
Africa  are  a  mad  mixture  of  mind  and  mud,  the  fetish, 
i.e.  religious  element,  is  of  primary  importance  in  it  all. 
For  it  is  "  God's  ore,"  they  say,  and  this  Spirit-mediation 
theory  of  theirs  is  only  a  frank  refusal  of  these  blacks  to 
admit  that  mere  stout  arms  and  tough  muscles  have  all 
the  say  in  God's  own  world.    "  Who  first  drinks,  first 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  277 

thanks,"  say  they.  And  this  African  of  ours  and  his 
"  other- worldliness  "  is  deeply  touching — wouldn't  even 
condescend  to  argue  with  an  Atheist.  "  How  do  I  know 
there  is  a  God  ? "  he  asks.  "  How  do  I  know  my  goat 
passed  over  that  wet  ground  if  not  by  the  footprints  she 
left  in  the  mud  ? "  Thus  any  such  phrase  as  "  laws  of 
Nature"  is  unknown  to  him,  for  an  act  postulates  an 
agent,  and  what  is  Nature  but  God's  mere  minion  ?  No 
Atheist  could  hoodwink  a  black  man  with  the  notion  that 
mere  laws  explain  everything,  for  your  negro  retorts, 
"  As  if  a  law  does  not  require  construction  as  well  as  a 
world."  Another  of  these  men  proved  the  existence  of 
God  by  the  quiet  query :  "  Who  ever  forgot  there  was  a 
Sun  ? "  A  proof  this  that  he  reads  his  Book  of  Nature  so 
well  that  in  every  rock  and  tree  God  is  staring  him  in 
the  eyes  and  shouting  in  his  ears.  Yet  in  the  teeth  of 
this,  such  an  expert  as  Burton  could  insist  that  "  the 
necessity  of  a  Creator,  so  familiar  to  our  minds,  is  gener- 
ally strange  to  savages.  In  the  present  day,  the  African 
races  generally  have  never  been  able  to  comprehend  the 
existence  or  the  necessity  of  a  One  God."  Fie,  Sir  Richard  ! 
Even  Cicero  long  ago  could  declare  that "  there  is  no  nation 
so  brutish  as  not  to  be  imbued  with  the  conviction  that 
there  is  a  God."  So,  too,  riutarch  :  "  We  may  search 
the  world  throughout,  and  in  no  region  where  man  has 
lived  can  we  find  a  city  without  the  knowledge  of  a  God 
or  the  practice  of  a  religion."  And  the  whole  continent 
of  Africa  choruses  an  eager  "  Yes  ! "  to  these  ancients. 


278 


THINKING  BLACK 


Some  more  eye-opening  "  thinking  black."  This 
pug-nosed  negro  of  ours  has  really  a  brain  of  phenomenal 
range.  This  you  can  best  believe  by  wiping  off  the  old 
slander  that  he  is  poor  in  numeration,  for  his  unit  is  the 
"  terrible-ten " — another  pinprick  this,  I  know,  into  the 
bubble  of  tradition.  Terrible  ten,  indeed,  for  starting  so 
ominously  with  a  round  number  he  soon  soars  into  the 
blue  of  arithmetic.  Thus,  leaving  hundred  [Chitota]  and 
"  thousand"  [Chihumhi)  far  behind,  he  reaches  the  figure 
for  a  million  [Mudinda).  Then  with  this  as  a  jumping- 
ground,  he  leaps  forward  into  planetary  arithmetic  in  the 
word  Diita,  a  million  times  a  million.  Here,  however, 
his  mind  calls  a  halt,  for  man's  empire  is  lost  in  the 
numeration  of  immensity,  nevertheless  he  tricks  the 
tongue  into  coining  a  word — Diona — the  "  all  "  things, 
that  is  to  say.  The  panther  spring  of  the  black  brain  is 
now  baffled,  but  not  beaten,  and  far  up  in  those  giddy 
heights  he  starts  to  dare  classify  grades  of  immensity. 
For  this  Diona  is  (1)  the  speechless;  (2)  the  voice- 
stifling;  (3)  the  measure-defying;  (4)  the  unthinkable. 
A  daring  "grand  total"  idea  this,  of  locking  up  all 
expanse  in  the  universe  into  one  word.  Asked,  however, 
to  be  concrete,  and  not  abstract,  he  says,  with  an  apologetic 
flourish  of  metaplior  :  The  grand  total  of  all  immensity 
may  be  stated  in  terms  of — ashes :  id  est,  all  things 
viewed  as  separate  units  must  be  conceived  as  the  finest 
powdered  ashes  ever  known  to  man.  For  unthinkably 
fine  though  they  be,  they  are  yet  only  a  mass  of 
granular  units!    Thus  quaintly  and  unquestionably  the 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  279 

African  can  philosophically  say,  "  Praise  is  silent  before 
Thee,  0  God,  in  Zion."  Very  inflated  all  this,  to  be  sure, 
and  very  much  like  mere  man  soaring  up  to  the  blue  in 
a  toy  balloon  ;  yet,  nevertheless,  here  is  proof  of  grey 
matter  in  the  black  brain.  Certainly  here  is  a  man  who 
deserves  better  than  the  Government  dog-bark  of  auto- 
cracy ;  even  as  here  is  the  real  reason  of  many  a  black 
bark  answering  white  bark  in  revolt.  Depend  upon  it,  ye 
rulers  with  the  Rod,  this  black  man  is  as  strong  in  brain 
as  in  biceps. 

{Later. ) 

We  Missionaries  are  accused  of  making  big  bouncing 
assertions  about  our  African's  mental  ability,  and  even 
many  a  good  friend  of  the  negro  claims  to  be  forgiven  if 
he  cannot  hear  of  this  without  impatience.  Living  as  the 
black  man  does  at  the  very  bottom  of  Life's  hill,  the 
inference  is  surely  a  very  fair  one,  that  the  African  is 
mentally  incapable  of  seeing  anything  in  the  light  of  an 
abstract  principle.  Hence  that  weary  and  too  confident 
assertion  that  this  African  of  ours  cannot  possibly  be 
strong  in  abstract  ideas.  The  late  Dean  Farrar  may  be 
isolated  as  a  serious  type  of  such  friendly  academic  critics, 
and  what  I  propose  to  do  is  to  quote  Farrar  as  a  heavy 
philologist  against  the  negro  and  then  proceed  forthwith 
to  hand  him  over  to  the  tender  mercies  of  the  two  great 
African  grammarians.  That  is  to  say.  Dean  Farrar,  a 
good  nc'grophile,  is  to  be  viewed  impersonally  as  a  very 
fair  type  of  the  average  Oxford  Don  critic  who  subjectively 
decides  on  a  question  really  not  in  his  sphere.  Appleyard 


280 


THINKING  BLACK 


"  The  vaunted  wealth  of  Bantu 
turns  out  to  be  a  conceahiient  of 
their  poverty.  It  is  due  to  that 
utter  deficiencij  in  abstract." 

Farrar. 


and  the  late  Clement  Scott  will  on  the  negro  side  be 
quoted  as  representing  the  two  extremes  of  a  long  line  of 
Bantu  study.  Of  course,  as  nothing  short  of  philosophy 
is  our  pro-negro  claim,  we  will  be  slavishly  literal,  and 
cling  hard  to  this  one  test-word :  The  Abstract.  Philosophy 
is  the  Abstract.  If,  therefore,  the  African  can  be  authori- 
tatively proved  to  be  strong  in  the  Abstract,  then  the 
African,  ipso  facto,  is  proved  to  be  a  philosopher. 

"  Bantu  is  highly  systematic  and 
truly  philoso2Mcal." 

Appleyard. 

"  The  (Bantu)  language  has  the 
ftdlest  expression  of  the  abstract 
one  has  met  with ;  broad  and 
delicate  in  its  conception,  essenti- 
ally suaviter  in  modo,  fortiter  in 
re  I"  Clement  Scoit. 

Here,  then,  we  behold  in  sharp  juxtaposition  the  oldest 
story  of  pro  and  con  cross-swearing  in  the  world  :  Farrar's 
loose  subjective  vagaries  confronted  with  hard,  stubborn, 
objective  data.  What  a  swing  of  the  pendulum  from 
zero  to  hundred  !  Is  black  white,  or  crooked  straight  ? 
This  is  the  thing  honest  men  yawn  over — arm-chair 
dogmatism  in  England  breaking  a  lance  with  "  the  man 
on  the  spot " — our  venerable  friend  Quod  Erat  Demon- 
strandum Esquire  smiling  down  so  condescendingly  on 
plain  Mr.  Quod  Erat  Faciendum.  The  former  correct  and 
subjective  to  his  finger-tips  ;  the  latter  with  his  jacket  off 
sweating  over  objective  data,  filling  dozens  of  note-books. 
For  Dr.  Clement  Scott  is  surely  a  good  example  of  being 


THUS  FAR  AND  NO  FARTHER  281 

very,  oh !  very  much  Mr.  Faciendum.  If  his  above- 
quoted  words  seem  to  be  exaggerated  and  sweeping 
("  the  fullest  expression  of  the  abstract  one  has  met  with  "  !), 
does  he  not  substantiate  them  all  in  his  737  pages  of 
genuine  Bantu  idiom  ?  Tortuous  and  tricky,  and  to 
the  tune  of  hundreds  of  instances,  he  it  is  who  has 
followed  the  marvellous  negro  far  into  the  penetralia 
of  "  thinking  black."  Emerging  from  it  all,  in  a  wonder 
that  is  almost  dismay,  Dr.  Scott  gasps — for  "gasp"  is 
the  word — that  Bantu  has  "  the  fullest  expression  of  the 
abstract  one  has  yet  met  with."  And  philosophy  is  the 
Abstract,  remember ;  ergo  the  African  is  proved  to  be 
both  brainy  and  beefy — in  fact,  has  brain  as  well  as  biceps. 
Contrast  Farrar's  serious  assertion  as  to  the  African's 
"  utter  deficiency  in  abstract "  ! 


CHAPTER  XV 
Red  Sunsets 


"Ah,  the  land  of  the  rusthng  of  wings,  which  is 
beyond  the  rivers  of  Ethiopia."  Isaiah. 


»  «  * 

"In  that  time  [from  beyond  the  rivers  of  Ethiopia] 
shall  a  present  be  brought  unto  the  Lord  of  hosts  of 
a  people  scattered  and  peeled,  and  from  a  people 
terrible  from  their  beginning  hitherto :  a  nation 
meted  out  and  trodden  under  foot,  whose  land 
the  rivers  have  spoiled,  to  the  place  of  the  name  of 
the  Lord  of  hosts,  the  mount  Zion."  Isaiah. 

*  •  « 

•*0h  the  generations  old 
Over  whom  no  church-bell  tolled, 
Christless,  lifting  up  blind  eyes 
To  the  silence  of  the  skies ! 
For  the  innumerable  dead 
My  soul  is  disquieted." 


CHAPTER  XV 


Red  Sunsets 


blackest. 


{7th  December.) 


NE  for  Mushidi !    He  tells  me  that  he  has  never 


yet  suffered  living  sacrifices  in  the  capital  here, 


whereas  all  around  every  little  H.R.H.  Nobody 
cannot  be  buried  without  them.  These  terrible  tales — 
"red  sunsets,"  they  are  called — are  hardly  tellable,  for 
here  it  is  we  reach  the  part  of  this  diary  that  should 
really  be  written  in  red  ink.  The  sun  {i.e.  the  Chief)  is 
sinking,  and  he  must  sink  in  red — a  real  scarlet  sunset, 
and  no  mistake.  It  is  quite  certain  that  every  poor 
chieflct  demands  his  regal  right  to  drag  down  with 
him  to  the  nether  world  at  least  one  or  two  splendid 
specimens  of  the  human  kind.  Mpaki  is  the  dread 
technical  term  for  this  institution,  and  these  are  mostly 
women-folk,  the  demand  being  that  the  living  sacri- 
fice must  have   no   blemish.      No  wonder  when  an 


286 


THINKING  BLACK 


African  hears  that  line  of  the  Bible  he  shudders : 
"  The  rich  man  died,  and  was  buried."  Instinctively 
they  think  of  a  holocaust  with  its  stream  of  blood ; 
and  then  it  is  Jeremiah's  famous  "  weepers "  put  in  an 
appearance,  professional  tear-manufacturers  these,  who 
produce — for  a  consideration — "  tortoise-tears  "  (sic)  by 
the  jar-ful.  "  Consider  ye,  and  call  for  the  mourn- 
ing women,  that  they  may  come ;  and  send  for  cunning 
women,  that  they  may  come  :  and  let  them  make  haste, 
and  take  up  a  wailing  for  us,  that  our  eyes  may  run 
down  with  tears,  and  our  eyelids  gush  out  with  waters  " 
(Jer.  ix,  17) — how  often  have  these  words  been  uttered 
in  Lubaland !  Two  of  the  prettiest  wives  are  gloriously 
dressed  and  anointed  with  oil  to  accompany  the  corpse 
to  the  "west  coast  of  Africa,"  i.e.  the  spirit- world 
(Kumhonshi),  and  never,  never  to  come  back  again.^ 
They  always  say  that  these  and  the  like  go  to  their 
own  death  with  alacrity ;  and  when  I  protest  later, 
they  remind  me  of  a  case  very  well  known  to  me  by 
a  personal  link.  That  is  the  Mbogo  Senior  incident 
down  in  the  Sera  plain.  At  the  Mjmki  ceremony, 
and  against  all  entreaty  to  the  contrary,  the  infirm  old 
wife  of  his  youth  insists  upon  accompanying  her  own 
consort  down  into  the  tomb  of  suffocation.  She  brushes 
aside  the  younger  folks,  and  orders  the  catching  and 
cooking  of  her  best  barn-yard  fowl  for  her  own  last 
supper.    She  assists  in  her  own  "  death  toilet,"  her  own 

>  That  is  to  say,  the  setting  sun  symbolises  the  advent  of  dark  night, 
i.e.  death. 


A    LUBAN  LADY. 


RED  SUNSETS 


287 


cleansing,  and  her  own  anointing  unto  her  own  burial. 
"  Nay,  who  should  go  with  my  lord  but  me  ? "  said 
she  in  response  to  the  "death-orchestra"  of  the  wailing 
cunning  women  w'ho  were  raining  down  "  tortoise-tears." 
And  then,  in  the  evening,  when  the  sough  of  the  first 
night-wind  passes  over  the  great  fen-bog,  behold  this 
old  living  sacrifice  hobbling  along  with  her  gourd  tobacco 
pipe  in  its  little  basket  to  attend  her  own  funeral — no 
wail  :  nothing !  and  the  dark  eternal  sets  in.  There,  in 
a  death  of  sufibcation,  she  received  her  "John  Anderson, 
my  Jo ! "  in  death's  embrace,  in  life  and  death  one. 
Surely,  here  in  a  pathetic  sense  we  see  them  sleeping 
together  at  the  foot  of  life's  hill,  after  many  "  a  cantie 
day"  together.  On  the  surface,  here  is  the  kind  of 
incident  claimed  as  a  feather  in  the  cap  of  polygamy, 
and  a  mad  Mormon  would  challenge  monogamy  to  produce 
in  like  environment  a  like  demonstration  of  conjugal 
affection.  But  such  conjugal  love  of  two  souls  only 
proves  monogamy.  Only  a  week  before  their  twin-death 
and  burial,  who  should  come  up  from  the  plains  to  pay 
us  a  most  punctilious  visit  but  precisely  this  dear  old 
lady,  Mrs.  John  Anderson,  and  her  Jo,  of  course  !  They 
hobbled  over  the  hill  together,  a  true  instance  of  negro 
man  and  wife  who  had  projected  their  last  visit  to 
"  town,"  as  they  call  our  Luanza.  A  brief  week  thence 
saw  the  tragedy. 

(Later.) 

By  far  the  most  exasperating  "  red  sunset "  known 
to  mc  was  the  death  of  my  old  friend  of  years,  the  great 


288  THINKING  BLACK 

Chona.  As  Lord  Paramount,  he  was  the  owner  of  broad 
lands,  and  what  could  you  expect  ?  Still,  that  is  just 
the  sore  point,  for  we  had  lofty  hopes  that  the  Chona 
— "  Destroyer,"  the  translation — in  his  peaceful  death 
would  create  a  clean  and  bloodless  precedent  for  the 
young  generation.  Now  it  ekes  out  that  one  of  his 
strongest  reasons  for  not  becoming  a  Christian  was  his 
fear  that  he  would  lose  the  divine  honours  of  a  vermilion 
sunset.  What  a  poor  King  Jesus  Christ  was  (he  argued) 
to  die  in  darkness  as  a  felon  !  How,  then,  did  this  Chona 
holocaust  eventuate  ?  After  all,  it  is  only  another  proof 
that  the  African  at  home  is  lord  of  his  own  soil,  and 
can  outwit  a  white  man  any  day.  Even  your  Sherlock 
Holmes  would  soon  find  mere  fertility  of  brain  handi- 
capped by  the  fact  that  he  was  only  one  against  a  million. 
For,  when  this  great  Chona  fell  ominously  sick,  I  saw  to 
it  that  several  lynx-eyed  negroes  were  hanging  around, 
their  plea  for  loitering  being  the  medicine  I  had  sent. 
Nevertheless,  long  ago  the  old  councillors,  who  sniffed 
treason  in  the  very  appearance  of  these  Mission  negroes, 
have  plotted  their  being  outwitted — and  remember,  for 
Reynard  to  outwit  Reynard,  the  subtlety  must  be  a 
marvel.  "  As  false  as  a  bulletin,"  became  a  proverb 
in  the  days  of  Napoleon  ;  so  these  old  "  death-doctors " 
copied  France,  and  resolved  to  create  a  strong  diversion 
to  the  North.  Thus  at  daybreak  the  news  (as  first  bulletin 
for  the  day)  was  on  everybody's  lips  that  the  sick  King 
had  been  removed  by  night  to  the  North — the  heat,  the 
marsh,  the  billions  of  mosquitoes,  the  ostensible  plea  for 


RED  SUNSETS 


289 


the  change  of  hospital.  (Entre  nous,  the  King  is  really 
dead  in  his  house,  but  no  "red  sunset"  can  take  place 
while  the  enemy,  in  the  form  of  my  messengers,  is 
ambushed  witliiu  the  sacred  atmosphere  of  death.)  But 
they  have  been  outwitted,  sure  enough  ;  and  when  all 
is  in  train  for  a  start,  out  they  spring  like  panthers 
from  the  dead  King's  hut,  blood  having  already  begun  to 
flow  in  the  death  of  the  weary  old  nurse  who  got  sudden 
death  as  her  nursing  fee.  Silently  as  suddenly  they 
now  slam  the  door  of  the  harem,  wherein  a  dozen  wives 
are  cooped  up  like  animals  for  the  sacrifice ;  and  the 
slam  of  that  door  is  answered  by  their  moan.  The  "  red 
sunset"  begins.  As,  however,  it  is  all  ceremonial  in 
character,  this  "  charnel-house "  work  has  a  "  method 
in  its  madness."  There  is,  first  of  all,  we  have  seen, 
that  sacrifice  of  the  old  nurse  ;  then  comes  another  human 
sacrifice  before  the  royal  corpse  can  cross  the  threshold. 
Then  the  whole  Via  Dolorosa  to  the  tomb  is  "  painted 
red " — another  human  life  has  perforce  to  pay  toll  for 
the  corpse  to  pass  the  town  gate ;  then,  en  route,  by 
a  sort  of  '*  minute-gun  "  arrangement,  death  follows  death 
till  the  tomb  is  reached.  Of  course,  old  scores  are  wiped 
out  in  blood  along  that  "path  of  thorns"  {sic),  and 
the  man  or  woman  who  on  that  day  has  no  brothers 
or  cousins  among  the  wire-i)ullers  is  in  peril  of  his 
carcass  being  given  to  the  fowls  of  the  air.  But  these 
things  are  only  the  beginning  of  sorrows  and  the  end 
is  not  yet — the  end,  in  fact,  is  indescribable.  For  the 
tomb  itself  is  the  climax  in  a  double  sense.    Down  in 


290 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  huge  pit  there  are  the  deaths  from  suffocation  ;  and 
up  in  the  sunlight,  on  the  new-made  mound  of  earth,  there 
is  a  thing  called  "  the  blood-plaster  "  [Kushinga  ne  milopa). 
A  mere  plebeian  negro  can  only  boast  of  a  mud-and-water 
plaster,  but  old  King  Coal  claims  a  blood -and-mud  one. 
*  *  * 

Here  is  the  reddest  "sunset"  of  them  all.  From  red 
we  have  gone  to  redder,  and  now  let  us  round  it  all  off 
with  reddest.  For  the  adjective  has  surely  entered  the 
sad  superlative  degree :  the  groans  on  the  crescendo ; 
deaths  amounting  sweepingly  and  authentically  to  the 
"  wipe  out "  of  a  whole  town.  Note  the  italics,  for  there 
is  nothing  visionary  or  elusive  here.  The  mother  and  the 
babe  unborn,  the  family  of  six  or  seven  strapping  sons, 
the  boisterous  band  of  precocious  negro  youngsters,  the 
grandfathers  and  the  grandmothers — all,  cent  per  cent, 
dead  in  a  heap,  plus  King,  plus  Queen,  plus  satellite 
concubines.  Did  I  know  the  man  ?  Yes,  very  familiarly. 
Could  I  authenticate  such  a  sweeping  "  wipe-out "  of 
human  beings  ?  Yes,  to  the  satisfaction  of  every  reader 
of  this  book.  Am  I  talkinc:  in  tens  or  in  hundreds? 
Hundreds  certainly,  and  not  tens.  And  that  is  where 
the  story  begins,  the  whole  tale  hinging  on  the  sweeping 
character  of  this  annihilation  of  a  solid  town.  Figures, 
1  know  too  well,  are  tricky  things  in  Africa — witness 
the  modern  tentative  census  papers.  But,  granted  they 
all  entered  a  trap  ;  granted,  likewise,  this  death-trap  had 
no  vestige  of  a  back  door ;  granted,  further,  only  three 
souls  emerged  therefrom,  more  dead  than  alive — and  then 


RED  SUNSETS 


291 


surely  the  deduction  is  inexorable  that  the  whole  town 
was  wiped  out  of  existence.  I  seem  to  see  that  old  friend 
of  mine  now  while  I  write.  A  brave  chief,  he  added  to 
his  prowess  in  war  the  exceptional  merit  of  being  a 
laborious  hunter.  Big-game  hunter  all  his  life,  hundreds 
of  animals  had  fallen  to  his  old  flint-lock ;  but  in 
his  youth  he  had  been  soured  by  a  dastardly  act  of 
mutilation,  an  enemy  having  cropped  his  ears.  When 
we  met,  he  was  a  dreaded  "  Black  Flag  "  in  revolt  who 
had  taken  to  the  Likurwe  Hills,  pouncing  down  on  passing 
caravans,  and  demanding  all  their  powder,  lest  it  should 
pass  on  into  his  enemy's  country  and  be  used  ultimately 
against  him.  One  such  caravan  so  tied  up  was  our  own 
Mission's,  a  band  of  Biheans  probably  two  hundred  strong. 
Resident  as  I  was  in  his  enemy's  country,  it  was  a 
precarious  business  to  cross  the  lines  and  enter  his 
stronghold ;  the  Black  Flag,  remember,  does  not  know 
the  Red  Cross.  That  visit,  however,  was  a  success ;  and 
having  struck  a  bargain  which  acknowledged  his  right 
to  the  plundering  us  of  all  powder,  we  bade  the  last 
farewell.  As  we  were  parting  for  ever,  he  slyly  un- 
coiled his  turban,  revealing  the  Royal  cropped  ears, 
much  as  Caesar  might  have  done  with  the  wreath  he 
wore  to  hide  his  baldness.  "Look,"  said  he,  "I  am 
fighting  for  my  lost  ears."  Poor  Rob  Roy,  he  had  only 
a  few  years  of  life,  and  then  came  his  Turneresque 
sunset,  when  he  dragged  the  whole  town  with  him  down 
to  the  grave.  The  story  is  a  cave-tale,  and  would  literally 
be  entitled  "The  Last  of  the  Troglodytes."    The  trap  in 


292 


THINKING  BLACK 


which  they  all  died  was  a  limestone  cave,  and  so  utterly 
did  they  disappear  from  mortal  ken  that  natives  will  be 
wary  of  all  such  subterranean  holes  in  future.  Briefly,  it 
came  fearfully  and  finally  to  this.  When  this  chief  made 
his  last  stand,  he  retreated  back  on  this  huge  cave, 
resolved  to  die  grandly,  impressively,  and  magnificently 
— die  with  all  his  people  round  him  like  a  winding-sheet — 
a  common  cave-coflBn  for  the  lot.  Long  ago  he  had  made 
his  dispositions  for  such  a  startling  "  sunset " ;  so  with  a  rush, 
and  under  cover  of  night,  the  whole  town  stampeded  into 
the  trap,  a  cave  seductively  large,  provisions  in  abundance, 
and  firewood.  But  alas !  unlike  many  of  its  spacious 
sister-caves  with  as  many  tunnels  as  a  burrow,  this  was 
only  a  long  deceptive  "blind-alley" — blind  the  cave,  and 
doubly  blind  the  hunted-down  negroes  who  entered  it. 
For  with  a  salvo  of  applause  the  enemy  now  rushes  up 
to  the  cave's  mouth  and  seals  the  entombed  doom  of 
all  that  horde  of  foolish  fugitives.  There  is  no  shriek, 
meanwhile,  from  these  runaways.  Oh  no,  only  the 
beginning  of  the  long,  lingering  end.  With  a  refinement 
of  cruelty,  the  enemy  now  sits  down  at  the  cave  mouth 
and  starts  to  "plug  the  leak,"  a  process  this  involving 
the  blocking  of  the  cave's  mouth  with  rocks ;  then,  over 
the  rocks,  a  banking  of  earth — thus  pathetically  and 
literally  making  it  a  colossal  tomb  with  the  old  orthodox 
mound  of  earth  on  the  top.  And  so  autumn  wanes. 
The  long  days  pass,  days  in  which,  with  sinister  signifi- 
cance, the  great  blue-bottle  flies  hum  in  and  out  of  the 
chinks  of  the  rocks  to  tell  the  tale  of  corruption. 


RED  SUNSETS 


293 


But  what  about  those  three  women  who  escaped  ? 
Listen  !  Some  weeks  elapse ;  then  out  through  one  of 
the  limestone  chinks  you  can  hear  a  gentle  moan — tell- 
tale moan  of  a  human  being.  There  it  is  again,  and  this 
time,  out  through  the  same  chink,  comes  a  wail  of  the 
moribund  :  "  We  are  all  dead.  Oh,  let  me  out ! "  She  is 
a  woman  moaning,  none  other  than  Nanga,  who  used  to 
live  over  at  Munema  village.  Outside  the  bully  warriors 
are  shaking  with  fear  at  this  voice  from  the  tomb.  Then 
they  summon  up  courage  to  challenge  her  that  she  is 
lying,  and  that  she  has  only  returned  from  the  dead  to 
be  their  undoing.  But  the  answer  they  get  is  her 
sepulchral  offer  that  if  they  will  only  disentomb  her, 
she  will  gladly  permit  her  two  hands  and  feet  to  be  cut 
off,  if  she  is  found  to  have  lied  to  them  :  *'  0  ye  out 
in  the  sunlight,  sitting  down  to  the  banquet  of  life,  let 
me  out  from  this  Lake  of  Fire."  So  at  long  last  here 
she  comes,  extricated  from  the  cruel  debris  to  the  light 
of  day — she  and  two  poor  half-dead  mortals.  Yes,  they 
bring  a  gruesome  tale  from  that  "  land  of  the  dead,"  a 
tale  of  slow,  lingering  emaciation  and  dissolution.  First 
the  food  failed,  then  the  faggots,  and  then  came  the 
exasperated  expedients  for  firewood — all  the  old  gun- 
stocks  and  spear-shafts  burned  off  first.  Then — good- 
night ! — the  great  gleaming  tusks  of  ivory.  This  tomb- 
cave,  be  it  noted,  was  also  the  chiefs  treasure-trove,  and 
there  lay  the  accumulated  ivory  of  years.  Thus  he  died 
in  his  glory,  heated  at  a  funeral  blaze  of  burning  ivory, 
"  Emperor's  Fuel,"  they  call  it.    It  beggars  all  description. 


294 


THINKING  BLACK 


Just  one  gleam  of  glory  shoots  up  before  darkness  de- 
scends. Not  long  before,  I  found  myself  in  that  doomed 
town  preaching  in  the  moonlight  with  a  tragic  intensity. 
Surely  in  a  glad,  good  way  this  was  a  silent,  secret  factor 
in  their  eternal  destiny. 

{9th  December.) 
Notwithstanding  all  his  mad  mob  of  cut-throats, 
I  opine  that  Mushidi  will  not  be  able  to  reckon  on 
even  one  solid  band  of  braves  when  the  day  of  doom 
draws  near.  Here  they  are  in  thousands,  all  armed  with 
"Tower"  guns,  but  nothing  even  faintly  approaching 
the  idea  of  a  Tenth  Legion  of  Caesar  or  an  Old  Guard  of 
Napoleon.  True,  he  can  count  on  many  a  strong  in- 
dividual, nearly  all  the  satraps  round  the  throne  being 
linked  by  marriage  to  the  despot  :  Kasamina  and 
Mumoneka,  with  many  more,  are  as  brave  as  loyal.  But 
mere  personal  prowess  can  never  be  equivalent  to  the 
discipline  of  the  machine.  Besides,  this  free-lance  idea 
only  means  that  every  leader  is  playing  for  his  own 
hand ;  and  when  that  works  out  (as  it  often  does)  at  one 
courtier  against  another,  then  the  foundations  are  shaky. 
Really  a  kingdom  within  a  kingdom  is  the  idea,  and  the 
concentric  waves  make  rings  within  rings  of  plot  and 
counterplot. 

Still,  there  is  no  man  in  the  whole  land  who  cringes 
so  submissively  as  just  one  of  these  great  ministers,  and 
Mushidi  persistently  repels  them  with  a  pelting  storm 
of  abuse.  Not  once  but  several  times  he  has  sized  up 
a  too  ambitious  type  of  Joab  minister,  and  got  rid  of 


RED  SUNSETS 


295 


him  in  the  polite  old  way  of  sending  him  oflf  to  kill 
or  be  killed  in  war.  Even  his  own  princes  he  treats 
in  the  same  "  go -to -shear -and -be -shorn  "  way,  the 
recent  case  of  his  son  Chamunda  being  notorious.  Too 
enamoured  of  his  father's  own  wife,  Mushidi  at  once 
ordered  him  up  to  the  North  to  fight  Chona ;  and  after 
a  year's  hard  struggle  the  poor  prince  came  back,  broken 
in  two  bones,  a  cripple  for  life. 

And  this,  remember,  is  the  regular  treatment  meted 
out  to  any  black  son  of  Zeruiah  who  is  too  strong  for 
him.  With  the  ladies,  however,  it  is  drastically  difierent, 
and  even  a  dame  of  high  status  is  coolly  executed  in 
the  capital  as  an  advertisement  in  harem  discipline. 
Who  will  ever  forget  the  great  death  of  Queen  Matayu  ? 
Here  was  a  lady  of  lineage,  brought  in  from  the  Far 
East  by  the  Arabs  as  an  offset  to  the  Maria  de  Fonseca 
marriage  of  the  Portuguese,  the  two  Oceans  bidding  for 
Mushidi's  commerce  with  the  debasing  bribe  of  rival 
queens.  Poor  Mushidi,  he  has  had  to  pay  for  it  in 
blood,  this  Eastern  marriage ;  for  does  not  the  native 
proverb  say,  "  Eat  the  bait,  and  you  are  on  the  hook  "  ? 
Certainly,  this  Arab  bait  was  seductive ;  but  as  the 
days  passed  the  news  began  to  spread  round  the  capital 
that  the  "  Eastern  Lady  "  {Mukodi  Wa  Kavanga)  was 
a  Jezebel  of  no  ordinary  sort.  Death  after  death  by 
poisoning  was  brought  to  her  door,  the  climax  being  an 
attempt  on  her  own  son.  "  Oh  ! "  said  Mushidi,  "  we 
will  soon  settle  that";  and  forthwith  he  convened  a 
council  of  elders,  who  doomed  her  to  die.    So  there  and 


296 


THINKING  BLACK 


then,  with  no  dawdle,  and  ignoring  all  political  com- 
plications of  the  future,  Tete  and  Kavalo,  two  generals, 
went  across  to  Mune'ma,  and  were  received  of  this 
Jezebel  with  her  usual  smirk  of  coquetry.  Invited  into 
her  own  house  on  a  plea  of  privacy,  she  was  strangled 
on  the  spot  as  a  witch,  the  mob  in  the  capital  declaring 
that  Mushidi  was  perfection  in  so  scorning  the  high 
status  of  such  a  grand  dame.  Cast  out  on  the  Lunsala 
Flats,  that  distinguished  witch's  body  was  despised  by 
every  passer-by,  and  speedily  became  carrion  for  the 
scavenger  hyenas  ever  on  the  prowl.  Jezebel,  I  have 
called  her,  because  that  name  in  her  last  moments 
became  awfully  and  literally  appropriate.  For  as  these 
executioners  entered  her  courtyard,  the  good-as-dead 
woman  cried  out  the  most  ancient  greeting  in  Africa  : 
"Is  it  peace?"  {Mutendef)  And  in  that  subsequent 
hurried  strangling  of  their  victim  they  could  be  heard 
literally  answering  the  old  Jehu  taunt :  "  What  peace 
so  long  as  your  whoredoms  and  witchcrafts  are  so 
many  ? "  But  Mushidi  has  not  had  long  to  wait  before 
he  learns  that  here  is  only  another  annoying  illustration 
of  the  fact  that  women  are  the  source  of  all  his  woes. 
The  roar  for  revenge  can  now  be  heard  on  his  Eastern 
boundary,  the  Rugarugas  taking  the  field  as  champions 
of  the  dead  Jezebel.  Thus  it  comes  to  pass  that  the 
dead  Masengo  is  the  casus  belli  of  his  Sanga  civil  war, 
just  as  in  the  East  another  wild  war  is  waging  over  the 
death  of  Queen  Matayu,  Docs  this  justify  the  Spanish 
saying,  "  Where  woman  is,  there  trouble  is  "  ? 


BOOK  TIT 


CHAPTER  XVI 
"Nemesis,  Daughter  of  Night" 


"Though  the  mills  of  God  grind  slowly, 
Yet  they  grind  exceeding  small ; 
Though  with  patience  He  sits  waiting, 
With  exactness  grinds  He  all." 

*  *  * 

"Instead  of  enquiring  why  the  Roman  Empire 
was  destroyed,  we  should  rather  be  surprised  that  it 
subsisted  so  long."  Gikbon. 

»  *  * 

"Down  they  come  these  ancient  nations— down 
they  come  one  after  another,  for  lack  of  righteous- 
ness." Matthkw  Arnold. 


198 


CHAPTER  XVI 


"Nemesis,  Daughter  of  Night" 

HEREIN  the  reader  ponders 
the  profound  difference  between 
eating  what  you  like  and  liking  what 
you  eat. 

HE  end  is  not  far  off  now,  for  here  in  this  large 
I  rambling  metropolis  you  see  Mushidi  fiddling  while 
his  Rome  is  burning.  If  ever  the  clock  of  destiny 
struck  with  decision  it  is  just  now,  the  final  simultaneous 
smash  of  such  varied  and  conflicting  elements  all  falling  like 
one  well-aimed  blow,  (By  the  way,  see  here,  once  again, 
how  God  can  rule  by  His  over-ruling.)  For  now,  when 
these  Rugarugas  begin  to  drive  in  the  Eastern  end  of  the 
Empire,  now  it  is  the  Sanga  civil  war  has  broken  out 
right  in  the  capital.  And  precisely  as  though  these 
propitious  events  have  all  been  elaborately  telegraphed 
across  the  seas,  now  it  is  that  Europe  gets  excited  about 
Katanga.  This  year  1890  is,  indeed,  a  climax  date  in  the 
high  politics  of  "  the  scramble  for  Central  Africa."  For, 
if  to  be  first  in  time  is  to  be  first  in  dignity,  then  the 
English  claim  the  country.  As  far  back  even  as  1875 
Lovett    Cameron's    great    journey   across   Africa  had 

2UU 


300 


THINKING  BLACK 


revealed  the  Katanga  country  as  a  highly  mineralised 
territory,  and  ever  since  then  Cecil  Rhodes  and  his 
disciples  had  mentally  annexed  it  for  South  Africa.  The 
British  argument  for  annexation,  if  not  logical,  is  at  least 
geographical,  for  is  not  Katanga  a  true  dependency  of 
South  Africa  ?  Moreover,  the  Congo  is  far  too  unwieldy  ; 
and  has  not  Belgium  bitten  off  more  than  it  can  chew  ? 
Would  Katanga  have  ever  had  sleeping  sickness  if  linked 
up  with  the  Cape  and  not  with  Boma  ?  Thus  it  was  that 
while  four  ponderous  Belgian  expeditions  are  slowly  con- 
centrating on  Katanga,  an  Englishman  forestalls  them  all. 
Much  to  King  Leopold's  chagrin,  and  before  his  elaborate 
caravans  are  above  the  horizon,  Mr.  Alfred  Sharpe  (now, 
of  course,  Sir  Alfred)  wins  his  spurs  by  walking  right  into 
Mushidi's  den  with  a  mere  handful  of  boys  :  proposal. 
Annexation  by  Great  Britain.  At  first  it  was  all  too 
exasperating,  this  blunt  diplomacy,  a  plenipotentiary  with 
scarcely  a  shirt  on  his  back.  Repelled  by  Mushidi,  and 
indeed  almost  murdered  had  he  known  it,  Mr.  Sharpe 
went  back  East,  never  dreaming  that  the  grim  chief  was 
so  struck  by  his  honesty  that  he  was  soon  to  relent  and 
recall  him.  For  relent  he  did.  If  you  will  allow  me  to 
be  slightly  autobiographical,  probably  this  tale  can  best  be 
told  in  the  first  person  singular.  It  was  on  this  wise. 
One  morning  when  I  turned  up  at  Court  to  salute,  the 
King  startled  me  out  of  all  my  company  manners  by 
appearing  in  hat,  coat,  and  trousers,  and,  wearing  his  tie 
under  the  left  ear,  insisted  that  English,  and  English  only, 
was  his  Court  language.    Then  he  roared  loud  and  long, 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  301 

and  this  was  the  kind  of  thing  : — The  King  was  pleased  to 
say  that  he  had  slept  well  and — to  a  purpose.  The  King 
(invention  again !)  was  glad  to  greet  one  more  of  the 
many  thousands  of  Englishmen  known  to  him.  The 
King  was  pleased  to  order  that  the  Union  Jack  of  red, 
white,  and  blue  was  the  only  pleasing  political  combination 
of  colours  in  the  world.  That  English  likewise  was  the 
only  true  speech  of  man,  and  he  would  make  all  speak  it. 
This  command  he  followed  up  with  a  rigmarole  dream  of 
"  Loudon  Town,"  curious  impressionist  sketch  of  that 
great  capital  compounded  of  Arab  fables  and  our  narratives, 
the  only  sure  thing  being  the  blinking  lamps  down  all  the 
London  streets.  He  had  been  there  last  night  per  dream 
chariot,  and  was  just  back  :  "  Goody  morning !  goody 
morning  !  all  of  you."  Next  he  springs  a  surprise  on  me, 
a  Missionary  trapped  into  politics.  For,  having  thus 
personally  visited  England — by  moonshine — and  verified 
**  London  Town  "  as  the  world's  greatest  village — "  The 
King's  Kraal " — he  now  desires  me  to  recall  Kadindo 
(Sir  Alfred  Sharpe),  and  he  will  give  him  his  gold,  give 
him  his  land — or  more,  if  he  stickles  for  it.  No  mere 
passing  whim  this  of  Mushidi's,  as  Dr.  Moloney  proves 
later  in  his  pro-Belgium  book.  "  Captain  Stairs,"  writes 
Moloney,  "  for  close  on  four  hours  plied  Mushidi  with 
argument  upon  argument  to  induce  him  to  take  the 
Belgian  flag — he  was  willing  to  receive  the  Ingereza 
(English)  flag,  but  not  that  of  the  Fiee  State." 

This,  mind  you,  from  a  member  of  the  Belgian 
expedition,  and  proof  positive  that  I  did  not  engineer  the 


302 


THINKING  BLACK 


Anglo-Mushidi  entente  cordiale.  Well  aware  am  I  how 
puerile  all  this  must  seem  to  my  Belgian  friends — I,  a 
Britisher,  puflBng  my  own  race  in  the  third  person. 
Nevertheless,  there  you  have  the  naked  truth  of  the 
matter,  and  history  owes  to  Mushidi  the  attestation  that 
he  did  shout :  "  Sons  of  the  dust,  we  know  the  English 
to  be  the  true  people  !  "  No  amount  of  arguing,  explain- 
ing, and  smoothing  down  could  convince  a  Belgian  that 
this  writing  East  to  bring  in  the  English  was  on  Mushidi's 
genuine  initiative.  All  the  appearances  are  against  us,  and 
they  naturally  only  see  in  all  this  one  more  instance  of 
the  unplumbed  depths  of  English  subtlety.  Yet  the  fact 
is,  with  these  good  Belgians  pressing  down  so  belligerently 
from  the  North,  Mushidi  proposed  the  oldest  and 
simplest  of  black  tactics — namely,  the  exploiting  of  one 
white  nation  against  the  other.  Memo,  for  Missionaries  : 
Do  not  dabble  in  "  high  politics,"  so  called ;  our  politics 
are  higher  than  the  high. 

So  time  goes  on  until  one  eventful  day  a  roar  from 
the  North  tells  of  the  advent  of  the  Belgians,  and  here 
comes  brave  Paul  Le  Mariuel  first.  He  has  been  following 
up  the  Sankuru  from  Lusambo,  and,  escalading  the 
Mitumba  Range,  arrives  at  the  capital  only  to  be  repelled 
by  the  Emperor.  The  founder  of  the  first  Congo  State 
poste  in  Katanga,  his  arrival  was  desolated  by  a  cruel 
fire,  the  huge  caravan  of  supplies  going  up  in  smoke,  and 
jeopardising  the  future  occupancy  of  the  country.  Poor 
Legat  and  Verdickt,  who  remained,  have  many  a  hard 
day's  fare  in  store  for  them,  yet  to  these  able  men  the 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  303 

Congo  State  in  Katanga  owes  all.  After  this  first 
expedition,  a  pause ;  then  comes  Delcommune,  a  late 
second.  He  has  followed  up  the  Lomami,  and  striking 
Lake  Kissale  on  the  27th  August,  1891,  arrives  at  the 
capital  6th  October.  Item:  Lost  Lieutenant  Hankansson 
at  Kinkondia,  killed  by  the  Lubans.  Item :  Makes  over- 
tures to  Mushidi,  and  is  repelled.  No.  3  Expedition  is 
still  from  the  North,  and  led  by  a  charming  gentleman, 
Captain  Bia  of  the  Guides — the  same  explorer  this  who, 
in  the  following  May,  died  in  my  arms  away  South  at 
Ntenke's.  (The  same  Bia  this  who  executed  the  murderer 
of  Major  Barttelot,  leader  of  Stanley's  rear  column.)  But 
none  of  these  men  struck  a  blow,  and  it  was  reserved  for 
an  Englishman  to  hoist  the  Congo  flag.  This  was 
Stanley's  friend  Stairs,  who  was  then  slowly  advancing 
from  Zanzibar  ;  a  poor  man  he,  daily  embarrassed  with  the 
stabbing  idea  that  he,  an  officer  holding  the  Queen's 
commission,  was  called  upon  to  repel  the  advance  of  his 
own  Union  Jack.  He  it  was  who  intercepted  Mushidi's 
written  command  by  my  hand  to  recall  Sir  Alfred  Sharpe. 
Fancy  an  officer  with  a  delicate  and  scrupulous  sense  of 
honour  waking  up  to  the  piercing  realisation  that  he  had 
become  the  tool  of  a  foreigner,  drawing  Belgian  money 
to  combat  English  pretensions  !  The  truth  is,  this  poor 
fellow  was  trapped  into  a  very  delicate  position,  not  of  his 
own  seeking  ;  and  as  the  days  advanced,  the  monstrous 
enigma  of  his  anti-English  duties  became  a  nightmare  to 
him.  Dying  as  he  did  before  leaving  Africa,  I  have  sad 
reason  for  believing  that  this  brooding  over  the  dilemma 


304  THINKING  BLACK 

hastened  his  untimely  end.  Nicholas  i.  of  Russia  died  of 
bronchitis  :  so  the  bulletin  said.  But  did  he  ?  Did  he 
not  rather  die  of  Alma  and  Inkermann  ?  "  His  was,"  wrote 
Mr.  Stanley  of  Stairs,  "one  of  those  rare  personalities 
oftener  visible  among  military  men  than  among  civilians, 
who  could  obey  orders  without  argument,  and  without 
ado  or  fuss  execute  them  religiously  :  courageous,  careful, 
watchful,  diligent,  and  faithful." 

And  now  for  the  ending  of  an  epoch,  for  the  capital 
is  at  last  giving  unmistakable  signs  of  that  process 
known  as  "  breaking  up."  From  the  East  came  Mushidi 
long  ago,  and  here  comes  Nemesis  from  the  same  quarter. 
Sitting  talking  with  an  Arab  one  day  in  his  verandah — 
the  28th  November — behold,  five  Zanzibaris  march  in 
from  the  East,  turbaned,  and  armed  with  breech-loaders. 
The  sentimental  if  not  substantial  element  in  this  advance 
guard  is  that  their  leader  is  Stanley's  own  Masoudi,  and 
he  bears  a  letter  from  Stairs,  who  is  advancing  slowly 
from  the  Lualaba  expedition,  300  strong,  and  armed  to 
the  teeth.  This  historic  letter  is  one  of  the  usual  charm- 
ing billets-doux  in  which  Captain  Stairs  and  his  four 
companions  formally  presented  their  "  salaams  "  prelimin- 
ary to  presenting  their  arms.  They,  says  the  epistle,  are 
coming  to  clothe  the  naked  land  and  are  only  bent  on 
acting  peaceably.  Finally,  after  much  groping  about  for 
Mushidi's  weak  spot,  the  letter  cleverly  finds  it  in 
rounding  ofi"  with  the  lucky  phrase  :  "I  am  the  English- 
man '  Lord  of  Artillery '  {Bivana  Mzinga),  W.  E.  Stairs." 
Finds  it,  in  all  conscience,  Mushidi's  weak  spot,  for 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  305 

although  all  his  instincts  are  up  in  arms  against  these 
intruders,  yet  this  happy  tag  of  Stairs  as  to  national- 
ity quite  makes  Mushidi's  heart  "white,"  as  he  terms  it. 
"They  are  English,  do  you  hear,  sons  of  the  dust?" 
shouts  Mushidi  to  the  crowd  of  people,  "  and  we  know 
the  English  to  be  true  people,"  Then  he  blows  a  heavy 
blast  throuoh  his  nostrils  and  orders  me  to  write  out 
his  royal  reply.  Not  a  philippic  this,  but  a  chat  on  paper 
in  which  Stairs,  with  wave  of  royal  hand,  is  invited 
to  come  on  and  put  these  Belgians  in  their  proper  place. 
Once  or  twice  I  was  just  reaching  for  a  metaphoric  bucket 
of  cold  water  to  dash  on  Mushidi's  political  plans,  when 
he  struck  in  again  and  again  with  his  favourite  and 
favourable  description  of  the  English  people  —  too 
favourite  and  too  favourable,  as  time  would  tell. 

Now  comes  the  great  Lord  Mayor's  Show  day — 14th 
December — when  I  am  delegated  by  H.R.H.  Mushidi 
to  push  out  to  the  suburbs  and  meet  the  advancing 
expedition,  orders  being  stringent  that  I  must  lead  them 
to  a  stipulated  camping-ground  in  the  capital — there  or 
nowhere.  Lean  and  travel-stained,  here  they  come  at 
last  out  of  the  grass  with  flags  flying,  Captain  Bodson, 
the  Marquis  de  Bonchamps,  Dr.  Moloney  and  Robinson, 
led  by  Stairs,  who  headed  the  Indian  file.  Fresh  and 
trig  from  Europe,  how  they  stare  at  me  in  my  bush  rags 
and  shaggy,  unmanageable  whiskers  !  We  greet  each 
other  in  French  and  English — F'rench,  I  mean,  as  far  as 
the  irregular  verbs  and  no  farther.  But  this  wayside 
pause  is  soon  brolceu,  and  on  we  surge  for  Mushidi's  in  a 


306 


THINKING  BLACK 


cloud  of  dust — dust  in  our  eyes,  dust  in  our  teeth,  and 
dust  all  over.  And  now  we  are  approaching  the  exciting 
goal.  The  distant  roar  of  the  capital  grows  louder  and 
louder,  and  soon  the  curse  of  Babel  is  upon  us,  Bunkeya's 
polyglot  negroes  roaring  out  their  rival  jargons  of 
welcome.  But  scarcely  has  Captain  Stairs  set  foot  in 
the  capital  when  Mushidi  illogically  recoils  from  his  own 
theory  that  the  name  of  an  Englishman  equates  the 
summum  honum.  He  who  knows  how  many  beans 
make  five  has  more  than  half  surmised  the  truth  when 
it  is  too  late.  A  wolf  has  come  in  sheep's  clothing. 
What  elegant  fiction  is  this  ?  Why  does  this  Englishman 
fly  a  Congo  Star  ?  Why  has  he  Belgians  with  him  ? 
Why  did  he  intercept  the  Mushidi  missive  recalling  Sir 
Alfred  Sharpe  ?  No  wonder  from  that  hour  of  disillusion- 
ment Mushidi's  shrivelled  face  became  an  impenetrable 
mask,  the  old  brain  plotting  deeply  and  darkly.  But  it 
cannot  last  long.  Four  days  of  skirmishing — diplomatic 
skirmishing  I  mean — and  then  the  end.  Is  it  a  grim  joke 
this  petulant  idea  of  JMushidi's  that  he  wants  Stairs  to  be 
his  "blood"  brother?  On  the  17th  the  same  proposal, 
"  I  want  you  for  '  blood  '  brother."  The  18th  ditto — same 
"blood"  brother  petulance.  The  19th — still  he  invokes 
the  phantom  of  "  blood  "  brother.  Finally  comes  the  20th 
and  crack  of  doom,  real  red  blood  this  time — and  without 
the  brother.  It  was  like  this.  On  the  19th,  Stairs  had 
hoisted  the  Congo  Star  on  the  high  sugar-loaf  hill 
adjoining  Nkulu,  the  same  peak  this  that  had  challenged 
]\Iushidi's  fancy  to  put  an  ivory  house  on  the  summit: 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT  "  307 

then  came  the  Belgian  proclamation  in  which  he  was  de- 
barred from  ever  again  shedding  blood.  But  the  King 
has  given  them  the  slip,  for  under  cover  of  night  he  has 
gone  to  Munema,  one  of  his  first  towns  in  the  country. 
The  Munema  where  he  is  soon  to  die ;  the  Munema  where 
his  first  wife,  Kapapa,  is — a  weedy,  depressed-looking 
woman  ;  the  Munema  where  he  began,  and  where  he 
will  end.  So  Stairs  follows  the  King  up.  Directing 
operations  from  his  fortified  camp,  Captain  Bodson  and 
the  Marquis  de  Bonchamps  cut  across  the  valley  in 
pursuit,  a  halt  being  called  at  the  Munema  gate.  Four 
head-men  are  sent  in  with  an  ultimatum,  but  an  hour 
passes  and  they  return  not.  Are  they  dead  or  are  they 
prisoners  ?  This  brings  matters  to  a  head.  After  parley 
it  is  agreed  that  Captain  Bodson  enter  alone,  the  body 
of  troops  remaining  outside  with  the  prearranged  signal 
that  they  rush  in  on  the  first  sound  of  firing.  The  same 
Bodson  this,  remember,  prize  revolver  shot,  whose  every 
aim  is  a  hit.  So  in  the  bold  Captain  goes — yes,  in,  never 
to  come  out  again.  Advancing  on  to  the  royal  palisade, 
behold !  Mushidi  surrounded  by  a  body-guard  of  his 
ghillies,  and  in  the  centre  the  four  emissaries — prisoners. 
Bodson,  nothing  dismayed,  comes  slowly  on,  and  Mushidi, 
King  to  the  end,  lurches  at  the  intruder  with  a  long 
sword,  then  falls  stone  dead  to  the  Captain's  revolver. 
Now  for  reprisal.  Bang!  bang!  go  the  "Tower"  guns 
of  Mushidi's  Ijody-guard,  and  poor  Bodson  falls,  mortally 
wounded,  with  the  dying  shout,  "  I  have  killed  a  tiger  ! 
Long  live  the  Kiug ! "    The  Zanzibaris  who  rushed  in 


308 


THINKING  BLACK 


were  so  maddened  by  wliat  liad  taken  place  that  they 
cut  Mushidi's  head  from  its  trunk  and  carried  it  on  a  pole 
back  to  the  camp. 

"  Every  bullet  has  its  billet,"  and  the  death  that 
stiffens  kings  and  slaves  alike  had  gripped  him. 
"  There's  no  pocket  in  a  shroud,"  says  the  proverb,  but 
Mushidi  didn't  get  a  shroud,  much  less  a  pocket  in  it. 
Thus  it  came  to  pass,  as  so  often  happens  in  this  old 
world's  history,  that  the  man  who  had  spent  a  lifetime 
laying  violent  hands  on  hundreds  of  innocents  must 
himself  make  exit  by  the  identical  doorway  of  a  violent 
death.  "I  happened,"  says  Dr.  Moloney,  "to  glance  at 
the  dead  man's  face.  It  seemed  to  wear  a  mocking  smile 
which  somehow  wasn't  easily  forgotten."  Even  in  death 
the  last  look  he  left  on  his  face  was  a  perfect  picture  of 
that  curious  career  of  his,  the  wolf  and  the  pig  still 
struggling  together  in  the  dead  features  —  Satan's 
signature,  indeed.  Better  for  him  had  God's  witnesses 
never  come  to  his  country  than  that,  having  come,  he 
should  have  turned  a  deaf  ear  to  them,  and  closed  his 
eyes  against  the  light.  This  Mushidi  was  emphatically 
a  man  "  wrapped  in  the  solitude  of  his  own  originality." 
His  head — and  he  was  proud  of  it— was  shaped  as  I  have 
seen  no  other  man's,  the  bumps  towering  away  like 
Alps  on  Alps  marking  him  off  as  one  capable  of  doing 
wild,  wicked  things.  Ever  since  I  have  known  him,  a 
look  of  cunning  craftiness  clung  to  his  shrivelled  features, 
his  general  demeanour  overbearing  and  haughty.  With 
him  it  was  emphatically  Aut  Cxsar  aul  nullus,  every 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  309 

one  in  his  country  laid  under  tribute  to  serve  hira.  "  He 
used,"  says  Dr.  Moloney,  "  to  call  these  worthy  men,  the 
Missionaries,  his  '  white  slaves,'  insult  them  before  the 
public,  and  despoil  them  of  their  goods." 

Across  the  Eastern  doorway  of  his  empire  on  the 
Lualaba,  Mushidi  had  figuratively  written  the  prophecy, 
"My  death  will  come  from  the  East."  All  travellers  entering 
from  the  East  were  suspect,  and  the  most  able  diplomatist 
had  a  hopeless  task  before  him.  Nor  did  the  wily  old 
warrior  draw  blank  here  in  this  death-prophecy  of  his. 
Yes,  die  he  did,  and  from  the  suspected  East  the  mortal 
bullet  came.  All  his  life  he  dreaded  that  East  Coast  and 
resented  with  extreme  asperity  the  advance  of  any  stranger 
along  his  old  route.  Does  not  the  thief  who  burgles 
through  the  pantry  window  suspect  that  the  policeman 
will  follow  by  the  same  aperture  ?  Little  did  Mushidi 
imagine  that  his  own  curiously  shaped  head  was  destined 
to  make  the  long  journey  out  to  the  Ocean  preserved  in 
a  petroleum  tin.  A  mere  instance  of  the  curio  craze  writ 
large,  the  Central  African  negro  thinks  that  preserved 
head  of  Mushidi  the  cap  and  climax  of  it  all.  For  was 
not  this  the  Mushidi  who  made  his  Babylon  a  vast 
museum  of  skulls  ?  Skulls  piled  up  in  pyramids  on  long 
tables ;  skulls  used  as  drinking-cups  for  warriors  ;  skulls 
hung  up  like  hats  on  pegs  on  the  lifeless  spokes  of  withered 
trees.  Such  a  "dramatic  neatness"  do  they  see  in  God's 
methods  that  they  speak  of  the  dead  despot's  skull  ever 
"  dripping,  dripping  blood  all  the  long  journey  to  the 
Ocean."    This  curious  idea  of  the  "  blood  that  never  dries  " 


310 


THINKING  BLACK 


sends  its  roots  down  into  the  belief  that  kingly  blood 
never  washes  out.  Of  course,  such  a  wonderful  head 
performed  miracles.  I  remember  travelling  in  the  wake 
of  the  famous  skull  of  Mushidi,  camping  at  the  same  spot 
as  the  victors.  It  was  here  Mushidi's  skull  performed  a 
supposed  miracle,  for  under  the  very  tree  where  it  was 
placed  for  the  night,  the  artful  ants  worked  hard,  and 
simulating  a  skull  they  made  a  perfect  mould  of  the 
"  sacred  skull  "  in  the  form  of  an  ant-hill ! 

But  we  are  doomed  to  black,  blacker,  blackest.  Hard 
on  the  heels  of  the  Sanga  guerilla  warfare  comes  dark 
famine,  just  as  in  the  Apocalypse  the  red  horse  of  the 
second  seal — war — is  followed  by  the  black  horse  of 
famine.  Galloping  through  the  stricken  land,  like  a  sort 
of  third  seal,  "  I  saw,  and  behold  a  black  horse — hut  he  that 
sat  thereon  had  a  balance  in  his  hand."  Thus,  even  in 
sore  trial,  our  God  does  not  leave  us  desolate,  for  we  see  also 
divine  balance  where  dying  natives  only  see  the  rushing 
black  horse.  (Ay,  beyond  and  above  famine,  balance, 
and  seals,  we  see  the  Loving  Lamb  Who  alone  is  worthy 
to  open  any  such  seals.  And  are  not  we  counted  worthy 
to  suffer  ?)  The  binder  of  the  Bible,  seemingly,  is  as 
important  a  personage  as  its  translator,  for  my  little  pocket 
edition  opens  automatically  at  Genesis  and  Romans. 
Surely  not  the  binder  but  the  Author  does  this  good  thing 
for  me  when  in  trouble,  my  Bible  opening  simultaneously 
at  the  1)lack  side  in  Genesis  xlii.  and  the  bright  side  in 
Romans  viii.  : — 

"All  these  things  are  against  me"  (Gen.  xlii.  36). 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  311 

"All  things  work  together  for  good  "  (Rom.  viii.  28). 
This  benighted  famine    experience  is   called  by  the 
Arabs  "  seeing  the  stars  in  the  day-time."    Even  before 
Captain  Stairs'  arrival  from  the  East  with  his  large  caravan, 
the  country  had  been  steadily  sinking  under  the  indirect 
pressure  the  Va  Sanga  were  bringing  to  bear  upon  Bunkeya. 
So  much  so,  that  when  the  new-comers  arrived,  the  tide 
had  gone  far,  far  out  in  the  hemmed-in  capital.  Food 
could  not  be  had  for  the  buying,  and  the  natives  every- 
where, hollow  as  a  drum,  were  eking  out  an  existence  on 
roots,  while  they  watched  their  corn  ripening  with  loaded 
guns.    Every  thief  was  shot  at  sight,  and  even  soldiers 
were  bulleted.    Thus  matters  stood,  I  say,  even  before 
Stairs  came  with  his  Arabs,  and  now  begins  a  struggle  for 
existence  such  as  never  before  happened  in  these  parts. 
His  soldiers  turn  out  to  be  (what  alas,  Koran  chanters 
often  are)  an  unscrupulous  lot,  and  loot  cruel  and  whole- 
sale seems  to  be  the  order  of  the  day.    The  strong  come 
off  better  than  the  weak,  but  the  victors  fare  badly 
enough  ;  eighty  of  their  number  have  died  in  the  capital, 
plus  seventy  dead  or  missing.    As  for  the  poor  natives, 
they  are  wiped  out  in  hundreds,  specially  all  the  old  folks, 
who,  hollow  eyes  unnaturally  large  and  bright  with  the 
weird  lustre  of  famine  fever,  are  forced  to  the  wall.  Thus 
Africa  reads  us  the  old  lesson  that  having  no  imports,  it 
can  only  as  a  vast  coDtinent  live  one  year  at  a  time.  The 
least  tampering  with  the  agricultural  year  means  blighting 
famine  :  explorers,  beware  ! 

And  how  do  we  live?    Here  is  a  subject  the  very 


312 


THINKING  BLACK 


mention  of  which,  I  regret  to  say,  is  calculated  to  disturb 
the  gastric  functions  of  the  stomach.  Even  the  Marquis 
de  Bonchamps,  from  many  of  whose  opinions  I  disassociate 
myself,  is  quite  correct  here.  Escaping  for  his  life  to 
Europe,  he  arrived  August  1892,  and  declared  that  for 
twenty-seven  days  their  expedition  had  nothing  better 
to  live  on  than  locusts,  ants,  and  even  grass.  This  witness 
is  true.  In  these  gnawing  days  of  famine  I  can  tackle 
grass  with  famished  gusto  ;  grass  seeds  boiled  to  an  emerald 
gruel  is  a  famous  food — Musunga  wa  Chifufia,  or  sul- 
phate of  copper  porridge,  the  name  of  this  green  gruel. 

As  an  anxious  alternative  I  also  eat  and  enjoy  thousands 
of  white  ants  with  ravenous  content.  The  said  ants  with 
a  good  supply  of  salt  make  an  excellent  repast,  for  being 
obese  little  insects  they  frizzle  finely  in  their  own  fat. 
Don't  forget  that  one  pinch  of  salt,  though,  or  you  have 
spoilt  it  all.  One  pinch  only  ?  Nay,  you  need  two — a 
pinch  of  salt  and  a  pinch  of  hunger.  This,  remember,  is 
no  laughing  matter  to  a  hungry  bush  preacher,  for  I  find 
the  difference  between  English  plenty  and  African  paucity 
is  the  old  candid  contrast  between  the  relish  of  a  man  who 
likes  what  he  eats  and  the  epicure  Englishman  who  eats 
what  he  likes.  Another  African  dainty  these  days  is  rats, 
five  little  rats  tied  to  each  other  by  their  twirling  tails  and 
put  on  the  famine  market.  Snails,  too,  arc  a  widely  eaten 
commodity  long  after  every  mongrel  dog  has  been  heard 
to  give  his  last  howl  on  entering  the  gaping  pot  of  gaping 
negroes.  These  snails  are  in  much  demand  by  Lubans,  and 
a  brisk  business  is  done  per  dozen — decimal  dozen,  I 


BANE    AND  ANTIDO.TE. 
A  great  snake  specialist. 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  313 

mean,  for  in  Africa  12  =  10.  Not  a  question  this  of  the 
negro  blase  palate  but  rather  the  pinch  of  hunger  ;  senti- 
mental repugnance  loathes  a  shining  and  repulsive  snail, 
but  its  nutritive  qualities  are  exceptionally  high.  So,  too, 
caterpillars.  Not  merely  when  famine  stalks  the  land  but 
tribally,  the  Luban  gloats  over  these  furry  little  creatures 
with  a  polite  name.  An  apologetic  African,  with  that 
day-in-day-out  ache  in  the  pit  of  the  stomach,  defended 
these  extremes  of  diet  in  the  clever  retort :  "Even  in  the 
dark,  who  ever  forgot  the  road  to  his  mouth  ? "  This 
famine,  of  course,  is  the  metaphoric  dark  night  to 
him. 

Here  is  an  equally  hungry  fellow  defends  his  doleful 
diet  of  boiled  snakes  by  saying,  "  A  hungry  man  will 
even  burn  his  mouth."  (The  snakes,  that  is  to  say,  are 
figuratively  scalding  food.)  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  the 
Lusato,  or  boa-constrictor,  does  taste  like  delicate  veal  and 
is  a  famous  Luban  titbit.  My  friend  Chivangwa  has  a 
lively  collection  of  snakes  of  many  colours  and  sizes,  and 
these,  kept  in  gourds,  feed  on  flour  and  mice  pending  the 
gluttonous  "  snake  supper."  Every  new  moon  he  takes 
them  out  for  dentistry,  and  instead  of  hanging  them  on 
a  peg  he  prefers  to  coil  them  round  his  neck.  Even 
antelopes  they  think  inferior  eating  to  snakes.  This  I 
found  on  sending  a  native  back  ten  miles  at  sundown  to 
bring  on  some  venison  I  had  killed,  but  on  reaching  the 
spot  ho  drew  blank,  the  antelope  non  est.  Hours  after, 
however,  he  lurched  into  camp  dumping  down  some  very 
toothsome-looking  steaks  in  the  moonlight,  not  mine  but 


314 


THINKING  BLACK 


some  of  his  own  prowess  as  substitute.  His  story  ran  that 
as  he  came  shambling  along  on  the  return  journey,  lo  !  a 
long  boa-constrictor  blocking  the  way.  Sprang  at  it,  slew 
the  snake,  seriously  skinned  it,  and  finally  cut  up  these 
steaks  ;  witness,  my  apologetic  messenger  in  the  moon- 
light offering  me  snake  veal  for  the  lost  venison  ! 

May  I  here  right  an  old  wrong  about  boas  ?  For, 
albeit  the  boa-constrictor  is  a  world-word,  it  is  quite 
certain  the  glamorous  associations  of  this  awful  name 
are  wildly  astray.  By  very  common  consent  the  boa- 
constrictor,  though  "  mother  of  all  snakes,"  is  the  most 
timid  of  African  reptiles,  the  natives  declaring  that  the 
mere  sight  of  man  so  unnerves  him  that  you  can  go  back 
hours  later  and  still  find  him  dazed  and  stock  still.  A 
mere  boy  who  spies  this  snake  in  the  bush,  before  darting 
oflF  to  bring  up  a  man  with  a  spear,  resorts  to  the  simple 
expedient  of  plucking  a  spray  of  leaves  and  leaving  it 
dangling  before  the  boa's  fascinated  eyes. 

Not  troubling  with  remoter  contingencies,  there  lies 
the  fascinated  snake  lost  in  wonder  at  that  swaying 
bunch  of  leaves.  Gazing,  ever  gazing  at  it  with  a  look 
that  looks  whole  dictionaries,  "the  agony  of  shyness" 
this  is  called.  Meanwhile,  scramble  and  scrape,  the  man 
with  the  spear  is  speeding  on  to  a  sure  victory — sure, 
that  is  to  say,  provided  ever  and  always  the  reptile's  real 
name  is  avoided  in  speech.  "  Call  him  not  Lusato,"  say 
the  natives,  "  call  him  a  coil  of  rope,  lest  you  break  the 
spell."  True,  therefore,  to  this  rule,  the  native  who  first 
sighted  it  in  the  forest  burst  in  on  the  villagers  to  report 


"NEMESIS,  DAUGHTER  OF  NIGHT"  315 

the  presence  of — "  a  coil  of  rope,"  the  ladies  all  remaining 
to  smack  their  lips  and  discuss  the  juicy  steaks  of — "  a 
coil  of  rope."  Does  not  name  equate  nature  ?  Change  the 
former  and  you  transform  the  latter. 

Locusts,  of  course,  are  considered  a  Central  African 
boon  in  feast  or  famine,  and  for  all  the  world  like  shrimps. 
One  can  surely  be  a  good  Pauline  Missionary  and  enjoy 
these,  for  were  not  locusts  an  Athenian  luxury  of  old,  and 
preferred  by  the  Greeks,  even  to  such  dainties  as  succulent 
quails  or  best  figs  ?  You  can  see  any  day  in  Africa  an 
exact  counterpart  of  the  Nineveh  sculpture  in  the  British 
Museum,  for  the  sight  of  boys  carrying  long  sticks  to 
which  are  tied  locusts  is  as  common  here  as  it  was  in 
Nineveh. 

But,  you  say,  surely  the  African  woods  are  a  well- 
stocked  larder.  We  certainly  find  it  otherwise,  for 
curiously  the  vast  and  dense  African  forest  is  a  poor 
refuge  in  the  pinch  of  famine.  Crammed  full  of  poison- 
ous tubers  as  it  is,  very  many  natives  nosing  all  over  the 
forest  have  died  sad  and  sudden  deaths  by  experimenting 
on  a  new  diet.  "  Touch  not  the  aristocrats  "  is  the  dread 
forest  charge  to  children  concerning  all  poisons  in  Africa, 
poisons  being  called  "aristocrats"  because  you  dare  not 
touch  them.  A  good  old  rule  I  find  workable  is  the 
eating  of  any  fruit  nibbled  at  by  the  monkeys. 

Unlike  the  organ-grinder's  captive  on  a  chain,  these 
forest  monkeys  are  fastidious  eaters,  and  with  endless 
supplies  before  them,  they  nibble  at  fruit,  rejecting  petu- 
lantly more  tlian  half    Besides,  as  a  monkey's  mouth  is 


316 


THINKING  BLACK 


supremely  clean  without  a  tooth-brush,  one  can  eat  with 
serenity  his  leavings. 

Very  much  of  this,  of  course,  was  not  by  any  means 
the  normal  Central  African  dietary,  and  the  dining  music 
was  not  always  to  the  tune  of  de  profundis.  Never- 
theless, my  practical  experience  of  purely  native  food  for 
more  than  twenty  years  all  points  to  its  peculiar  acclima- 
tising properties,  and  it  seems  in  some  unarguable  sense 
true  that  if  you  wish  to  be  much  in  Africa,  then  the  said 
Africa  must  be  much  in  you.  Certainly  it  is  along  the 
lines  of  an  ideal  African  dietary  that  the  "blackwater" 
problem  will  be  solved.  They  challenge  all  puzzling 
diseases  with  the  pungent  query  :  "  What  has  the  invalid 
eaten  ? "  Hence  their  national  saying  (an  unconscious 
Irishism):  "Eat  one  thing,  and  then  you'll  know  what 
you  have  died  of ! "  Thus  when  he  sees  a  European  dip 
into  so  many  different  tins,  the  sage  negro  says  trium- 
phantly :  "  That  is  why  you  '  whites '  die  off  so  easily  :  we 
Africans  eat  only  one  thing,  so  we  know  what  kills  us." 
For  this  is  the  meaning  of  that  most  curious  name  the 
white  man  receives  from  his  negro — Kaminamabweta. 
Supposed  to  be  a  compliment  of  the  first  water,  it  means 
"  Mr.  Tin-Swallower."  Thus  you  see  this  tin-swallowing 
by  the  European  is  the  African's  glory,  for  does  it  not 
mean  an  assured  income  as  a  carrier  of  the  terrible  tins  ? 


CHAPTER  XVII 
Our  Eastern  Exodus 


"  Behold  I  will  do  a  new  thing.  ...  I  will  even 
make  a  way  in  the  wilderness."  Isaiah. 


m  *  * 

"  Go  through,  go  through  the  gates :  prepare  ye 
the  way  of  the  people :  cast  up,  cast  up  the  high- 
way :  gather  out  the  stones :  lift  up  a  standard  for 

the  people."  Isaiah. 

*  *  » 

"  The  voice  of  him  that  crieth  in  the  wilderness, 
.  .  .  Make  straight  in  the  desert  a  highway  for  our 
God."  Isaiah. 


3i8 


CHAPTER  XVII 


Our  Eastern  Exodus 

HEREIN  the  reader^  following 
the  manner  and  method  of  ^MoseSy 
pitches  his  tent  towards  the  sunrising. 

THE  scene  now  changes  to  the  East  of  the  Lufira,  for 
Babylon  is  fallen,  Mushidi  dead  and  done  with. 
And  as  the  hart  panteth  after  the  water-brooks  so 
we  abhor  the  old  muddy  wells  of  Bunkeya  and  break  away 
East  to  the  far-flowing  Lufira.  The  slaves  long  ago  took 
the  bit  in  their  teeth  and  ran  off  on  their  own  ;  now,  all 
alone  we  must  make  a  fresh  start  on  fresh  soil,  and  round 
our  cluster  of  huts  the  future  great  population  will  gather. 
Lofoi  Valley  is  our  first  choice  of  a  site,  the  Belgian  fort 
being  two  miles  down  stream  from  our  Mission  camp.^ 
At  first  blush,  this  proximity  of  Christ  and  Caesar  does  not 
seem  prudential  enough,  yet  this  of  all  things  is  the 
country's  greatest  need.  Foreigners  though  they  are, 
Government  under  any  flag  is  the  crying  desideratum  of 

1  The  subsequent  history  of  this  venture  is  interesting.  Mr.  Campbell 
came  down  from  Mweru  with  Mr.  George  and  began  at  Mwcna.  Tlien  Mr. 
Clarke  came  from  the  AVcst,  and  he  and  Mr.  Iliggins  branched  off  to  slart 
the  splendid  Koni  station.  Then  Mr.  Anton  ;  the  final  phase  being  Mr. 
Last,  beginning  at  Bunkeya,  and  Mr.  Zentler  near  Kavauiba  Lake. 


320 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  moment.  Far  from  treating  these  Belgian  new-comers 
to  a  cold,  hostile  stare,  we  rallied  round  their  ensign  and 
wheedled  all  sorts  of  negroes  into  a  loyalty  that  has  stood 
the  stress  of  years.  When  there  was  no  king  in  Israel 
every  one  did  that  which  was  right  in  his  own  eyes,  and  a 
like  anarchy  menaces  us.  Granted  years  of  grinding 
autocracy  and,  be  sure  of  it,  the  day  the  political  pendulum 
begins  to  move  it  will  go  full  swing  to  anarchy  :  apres 
moi  le  deluge. 

So  off  we  trek  East  for  the  new  start  with  many  a 
haunting  memory  of  the  Bunkeya  charnel-house.  Our 
backward  look  at  the  dark  den  is  full  of  sad  regret  that 
there  we  had  been  hammering  away  at  the  iron  gates  of 
Mansoul  and  never  a  surrender.  Fishing,  however,  is 
Christ's  own  simile  of  this  business  of  saving  souls,  and 
our  farewell  was  as  cheerless  as  that  of  the  man  who  from 
dawn  to  dusk  of  a  wintry  day  has  fished  a  cold  Scotch  loch 
with  never  a  nibble.  Yet  watch  again  the  "  dramatic 
neatness  of  God's  methods,"  and  how  at  eventide  it  can 
be  light.  Just  then,  in  a  brown  study  that  was  almost 
black,  God  gave  me  my  first  soul,  a  wild  man  of  blood 
who  had  been  an  executioner  in  the  old  days.  Smish  was 
his  name,  the  same  in  after  years  who  became  an  honest 
elder  and  won  two  other  elders.  The  sun  is  westering, 
and  Mr.  Lane  and  I  have  said  good-bye  to  the  doomed 
Babylon,  of  which  place  it  was  legally  true  that  a  Garen- 
ganze  man  could  not  die  outside  it.  Stupidly,  I  had 
lingered  too  long  at  my  good-byeing,  and  was  in  fact  lost 
in  one  of  the  too  many  roads  leading  out  from  the  capital. 


On  the  Lualaba. 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS 


321 


when  a  voice  reached  me  in  warning.    Was  in  no  humour 
to  bandy  explanations  with  any  one,  but  here  comes  a  man 
out  of  the  grass — our  dear  Smish  of  the  future,  w^ho  shows 
me  the  way.    So  oflF  we  go  together,  never  to  separate ; 
this  whole  initial  adventure  being  the  parable  of  our 
friendship  in  the  future.    Right  away  on  that  road  I  paid 
him  back  in  kind  and  showed  him,  the  lost  executioner,  a 
way  he  did  not  know.    Now  he  knows  it  better  than  any 
of  us.    Son  of  Belial  though  he  was,  I  soon  found  that  for 
a  native  he  had  a  delicate  and  scrupulous  sense  of  honour. 
Listened  to  the  Gospel  gingerly  and  with  tight-shut  lips ; 
no  effusive  reply  but  rather  a  constrained  look  of  reflection. 
And  then  came  salvation  for  even  such  as  he —  from  mean- 
ness to  nobleness,  from  limitation  to  enlargement.  Smish 
was  his  name,  but  "  Gad "  it  should  have  been,  for  after 
him  "  a  troop  cometh."    Conceive  how  the  old  men  of  the 
land  looked  aghast  at  the  temerity  of  the  young  genera- 
tion daring  to  link  their  lot  with  "  strangers,"  this  very 
word  ( Veni)  meaning  "  the  folks  you  don't  know  where 
they  come  from."    "  No,"  said  Smish,  "  but  I  know  where 
these  strangers  are  going  to,  and  I  am  going  with  them." 
So  here  comes  the  cleavage  between  the  old  generation 
and  the  young,  between  the  "  hitherto's  "  and  the  "  hence- 
forward's."    The  former  all  eyes  to  the  rear,  adoring  the 
past,  sighing  for  the  might-have-been's  ;  the  latter  looking 
forward,  alert  and  surmising,  " 'Tis  better  on  before." 
"  Last  words  are  lasting  ones,"  and  his  dying  prayer  as  he 
lifted  up  his  eyes  to  Heaven,  death  dews  on  forehead,  was, 

"  Father,  my  journey  is  done — I  come." 
20 


322 


THINKING  BLACK 


Nestling  at  the  foot  of  the  Great  Range,  here  it  is  on 
the  Lofoi  River  we  cradle  the  Lufira  Valley  Mission.  But 
it  seems  a  cardinal  defect  of  this  place  is  a  tendency  to  be 
drowned  like  a  rat.  Only  the  other  day  we  groaned  (or 
growled?)  in  the  capital  as  we  bought  a  few  drops  of 
water ;  now  here  is  this  feast-or-famine  Africa  giving  us 
too  much.  The  other  night  we  were  all  in  our  first  sleep 
when  the  great  boom  of  on-coming  torrent  broke  on  the 
out-lying  hamlets,  and  then  comes  a  stampede  from  all 
directions  to  us  in  the  centre.  For  we  are  known  to  be 
on  the  highest  spot  in  the  vicinity.  There  is,  however, 
such  impetuosity  in  the  rush  of  the  dark  devastating 
waters  that  it  becomes  quickly  evident  we  were  all  far  too 
low,  so  the  next  thing  is  to  rush  for  the  nearest  trees  and 
ant-hills.  In  this  stampede  mothers  lose  sight  of  husbands 
and  little  ones,  and  those  separated  keep  up  a  wild-beast 
howling  to  one  another  in  the  pitch  dark  from  their 
different  perches.  No  time  for  looking  after  mere  material 
belongings,  as  in  a  case  of  water  slowly  rising  upon 
us — nothing  heard  but  that  booming  coming  down 
the  valley,  above  which  were  the  shrieks,  "Water! 
Water !  Fly !  Death  has  come ! "  The  shrieking  soon 
subsided  into  a  brave  acceptance  of  this  that  means 
to  them  so  much  of  desolation,  destitution,  and  death, 
for  as  the  waters  have  already  risen  waist-deep  in 
ten  minutes,  there  is  no  knowing  where  it  will  stop. 
Shivering  round  a  smoking  and  flickerless  fire  of  green 
wood,  there  tliey  stand  on  ant-hills — ant-hills  we  had 
always  thought  only  a  blight  on  the  beautiful  valley 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  323 


scenery,  but  now  precious  life- belts  for  the  Avhole 
community. 

Mr.  Thompson  and  I  climbed  up  on  the  roof  of  our 
grass  house  after  rushing  about  in  the  water,  making 
more  or  less  futile  attempts  at  salvage  work — human 
life,  of  course,  ranking  first — and  you  are  hereby  permitted 
to  think  of  this  midnight  perch  of  ours  in  wet  garments 
as  indicating  the  most  miserable  night  we  ever  passed. 
We  stick  on  to  the  high-pitched  roof  with  pious  pertinacity, 
constantly  pinching  ourselves  into  wakefulness,  for  the 
tendency  to  doze  is  very  tempting,  but  in  that  event  so 
also  is  the  other  tendency  to  go  clear  over  the  edge  of  the 
thatch  into  the  flood.    A  crescent  moon  rose  about  one 
o'clock,  lighting  up  a  scene  as  bleak-looking  as  it  was 
cold  and  miserable  :  our  little  Mission  settlement  wholly 
under  water,  only  the  tops  of  banana  trees  appearing  to 
mark  the  paths.    And  not  only  our  special  spot,  so  flood- 
proof  as  we  thought  it,  but  the  whole  country,  as  far  as 
the  eye  can  reach,  one  vast  pale  stretch  of  water  reflecting 
the  moonlight  and  looking  all  the  more  ghastly  on  that 
account  when  we  thought  of  the  hamlets  submerged  and 
tragedies  enacted  in  the  darkness.    The  longest  night  I 
ever  spent  in  my  life  was  on  that  roof-top  watching  for 
the  day,  and  never  was  sound  so  welcome  as  the  first 
shrill  clarion  of  a  surviving  cock  on  a  tree  branch.  Then 
when  the  Eastern  sky  grew  red,  and  finally  the  sun  rose 
to  answer  all  our  questionings  begotten  in  the  darkness, 
we  were  speechless,  for  here  was  a  great  lake — Mweru,  some 
called  it  who  were  born  there.    Look  !  glistening  red  in 


324 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  rising  sun,  whole  herds  of  antelopes  crowding  each 
other  off  the  ant-hills,  each  paltry  peak  their  true  Mount 
Ararat  in  the  deluge.  See,  too,  the  swimming  snakes 
darting  about,  heads  erect  and  fangs  menacing.  Add  to 
this  a  thousand  rats  drowned  and  drowning.  The  crocodiles, 
too,  have  leaped  the  banks  and  are  wallowing  in  new 
fishing-ground.  Fancy  an  oily  crocodile  with  unconquerable 
levity  sailing  in  triumph  into  your  submerged  kitchen  ! 
He  does  not  need  to  cook  to  eat,  albeit  he  has  come  to  eat 
the  cook.  It  took  three  days  for  the  waters  to  assuage, 
and  for  more  than  a  week  everywhere  we  moved  was 
through  sinking  quagmire.  On  venturing  into  our  houses 
again  to  get  a  notion  of  the  damage  sustained,  the  awful 
smell  of  decomposing  food,  etc.,  drove  us. back.  To  in- 
ventory the  losses  is  impossible,  and  after  searching  in 
vain  a  reasonable  time  for  anything  once  possessed  you 
give  it  up  and  reckon  it  among  antediluvian  possessions 
and  memories. 

But  again,  let  us  ask  the  question  :  Is  this  proximity 
of  Fort  and  Mission  prudential  ?  Now,  here  it  may  not 
be  amiss  to  suggest  that  the  particular  peril  of  most 
Missions  in  Africa  is  the  tendency  of  Government  and 
Mission  to  go  their  own  ways,  seeking  as  wide  a  berth 
as  possible.  But  this  amounts  ultimately  to  a  peril,  for 
only  with  the  civil  power  keeping  a  Mission  in  its  proper 
place  can  the  latter  be  stripped  of  its  ftxlse  prestige. 
Many  a  little  Protestant  Pope  in  the  lonely  bush  is  forced 
by  his  self-imposed  isolation  to  be  prophet,  priest,  and 
king  rolled  into  one — really  a  very  big  duck  he,  in  his 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  325 


own  private  pond.    Caesar  was  not  the  only  man  who 
said  he  would  rather  be  first  in  a  village  than  second  in 
Rome.    Quite  seriously  he  is  forced  to  be  a  bit  of  a 
policeman,  muddled  up  in  matters  not  even  remotely 
in  his  sphere.    Now  only  this  pinch  of  isolation  forces 
such  an  one  to  act  oddly,  for  many  a  godly  man  has 
blushed  an  ex  post  facto  regret  at  actions  more  judicial 
than  judicious.    To  call  this  provocative  policy  of  isolation 
"  potential  popery  "  seems  too  strong  an  epithet,  but  a 
glance  at  Cardinal  ]\Ianning's  Origin  of  the  Temjwral 
Power  of  the  Pope  is  decisive.    If  my  memory  does  not 
trick  me,  I  think  you  will  find  Manning  traces  this 
pestilential  pretension  to  just  such  a  simple  source,  for 
when,  oh,  when  was  the  Bishop  of  Rome  trapped  into 
all  the  toils  and  terrors  of  the  Temporal  Power  ?  Why, 
surely  after  the  fall  of  Romulus  Augustulus,  in  the  absence 
of  imperial  rulers  in  Rome,  the  primitive  Shepherd  of 
Souls  was  forced  (?)  into  ruling  with  the  rod,  the  significant 
end  thereof  being  a  triple  crown.    Quoth  Luther,  "  I  am 
more  afraid  of  my  own  heart  than  of  the  Pope  and  all  the 
Cardinals.    I  have  within  me  the  great  Pope  Self";  to 
which  we  say  "  Bravo  !  "  for  well-beloved  Martin. 

«  #  ^ 

Here  come  curious  complications,  and  I  a  Missionary 
am  compelled  to  become  a  Commandant.  It  is  a  fine 
saying  and  true  that  a  shoemaker  should  stick  to  his 
last ;  how  much  more  the  Missionary  and  his  non-meddling 
in  politics  ?  Yet  all  this,  in  Africa,  though  trite  enough 
to  be  a  platitude  and  logical  enough  to  be  an  axiom. 


326 


THINKING  BLACK 


is  easier  to  talk  than  live.    Did  not  poor  Pilkington  up 
North  die  with  a  rifle  in  his  hand  repressing  revolt? 
Did  not  Livingstone  wear  a  Consul's  hat?  Remember, 
here  in  the  bush  you  have  no  parading  policeman  who 
runs  to  your  call ;  no  clean-cut  institutions  of  civilisation 
where  each  official  is  seriously  saddled  with  responsibility. 
Unlikely  things  can  happen,  and  at  this  point  the  most 
unlikely  of  all  falls  to  my  lot.    Hard  by  our  Mission  camp 
on  the  Lofoi,  the  Belgians  have  built  their  Fort,  the  whole 
garrison  consisting  of  a  picked  band  of  English  Haussas 
and  Dahomey  men.    But  on  the  East  the  Arabs  are 
hemming  us  in,  so  unless  the  Government  makes  an  ag- 
gressive sortie  as  far  out  as  Lake  Mweru,  these  Arabs  will 
certainly  construe  silence  as  supineness  and  be  on  us  like 
a  bolt.    What's  to  be  done  ?    These  are  the  days  when 
the  solidarity  of  the  white  race  swamps  petty  national 
distinctions.    Did  not  Julius  Caesar  say  that  on  crossing 
over  to  England  he  found  the  inhabitants  of  that  island 
called  Belgee  ?    Why  should  not  these  Belgians  now  have 
their  revenge  ? 

Unlike  Caesar,  who  encountered  people  called  Belgae 
in  territory  called  Britain,  these  Belgians  have  found 
people  called  British  in  territory  called  Belgian.  Witness, 
then,  the  curious  sequel.  In  the  dead  of  night  Captains 
Brasseur  and  Verdickt  sit  down  and  write  their  last 
will  and  testament  (poor  Brasseur  was  killed  in  the 
second  Arab  sortie),  and  off  they  start  towards  the  East, 
leaving  me  a  poor  half-and-half  creature  indeed  :  acting 
Commandant  of  the  Fort  with  my  soldiers  to  drill  and  at 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS 


327 


the  same  time  God's  Missionary  to  the  heathen.  The 
Central  African  equivalent  this  to  one's  next-door 
neighbour  in  England  shutting  up  house  and  leaving 
you  his  key  with  a  request  to  keep  your  eye  on  the 
place.  Only  in  this  important  instance  your  neighbour 
happens  to  be  the  local  Lord  Kitchener,  and  the  Fort 
and  garrison  are  all  thrown  on  your  shoulders — you, 
a  semi-saint,  semi-soldier.  Such  is  sad,  bad,  and  mad 
old  Africa,  the  ex  officio  Commandant  in  you  tugging 
one  way  and  the  Missionary  in  the  same  "  you  "  tugging  the 
other.  The  shrill  call  of  the  bugle  and  the  soft  voice 
of  the  evening  hymn — what  a  muddle  of  memories ! 
A  pile  of  regulations,  all  law,  law,  law ;  the  pages  of 
the  Gospel,  all  grace,  grace,  grace.  Imprisoning  a  soldier 
for  insubordination  at  morning  parade,  and  in  the  evening, 
under  the  diamond  stars,  preaching  deliverance  to  the 
captives.  The  weary  suspense,  too,  of  it  all.  The  night 
alarms  besides ;  all  the  superficial  feelings  on  the  alert 
on  a  moonless  night.  Then,  the  uncertainty — would 
they  ever  come  back,  or  would  the  Arabs  eat  up  the 
column  ?  Must  I  defend  the  Fort  to  my  last  cartridge  ? 
All  these  thoughts  come  to  me  with  the  impact  of  a 
blow,  the  man  within  the  man  fighting  the  man  outside 
the  man,  Missionary  versus  Commandant.  Although 
I  did  two  years'  soldiering  in  Scothmd,  be  sure  of  it, 
there  is  uttered  much  ungrammatical  and  unmilitary 
nonsense  in  the  shape  of  orders.  My  corporal,  however, 
is  a  Haussa  gem  and  saves  me  much  trouble.  So 
eminently  and  unaffectedly  a  gentleman,  I  can  trust 


328  THINKING  BLACK 

him  on  lonely  night  duty,  our  common  bond  of  English- 
manship  being  his  choicest  consolation.  Always  scrupu- 
lously dressed  in  navy  knickers,  red  turkey  twill,  and 
fez,  he  often  tells  me  that  he  has  resolved  to  die  as 
artistically  as  a  regard  for  a  clean  uniform  will  allow. 
The  Arabs,  moreover,  are  his  co-religionists,  and  if  taken 
he  prefers  death  at  their  hands — at  any  rate,  they  kill 
you  neatly  and  thoroughly  with  a  knife.  The  maddening 
rumours,  too,  are  as  dangerous  as  dubious,  for  my  native 
scouts  vie  with  each  other  in  running  silly  screeds  off 
the  reel.  Even  granting  a  germinal  grain  of  truth  in 
these  rumours,  the  said  grain  grows  luxuriantly  in  the 
fertile  soil  of  a  black  brain,  and  putting  two  and  two 
together  they  always  make  six. 

Making  allowance,  however,  for  the  wear  and  tear 
of  language,  I  guessed  successfully  some  of  the  happenings 
over  the  mountains.  The  twenty  men  reported  as 
court-martialed  and  shot  turned  out  to  be  only  a  chief 
executed  in  error.  The  annihilation  of  the  column — 
a  terrible  contingency  for  me — merely  meant  a  sharp 
repulse,  demi-defeat  call  it.  So  the  weary  days  wear 
on,  until  my  nerves  are  almost  worn  to  a  thread.  The 
great  black  wall  of  the  range  stretches  North  with  the 
vast  savannah  rolling  miles  below.  How  natural  for 
the  mind  to  leap  those  mountains,  then  on,  on  to  the 
Lualaba ;  on  yet  farther  to  Tanganyika ;  up  now  to 
the  Nile  and  down  to  Khartoum  where  Gordon,  great 
lonely  soul,  fell  so  nobly.  Certainly,  he  it  was  who 
wrote  the  words  that  have  become  my  pillow  of  peace, 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  329 


his  valediction  to  all  weary  outposts.  Almost  the  last 
line  he  ever  wrote  :  "The  hosts  are  with  me,  Mahauaim." 
For  if  it  be  good  Hebrew  to  translate  this  word  as  the  "  two 
hosts,"  then  surely  it  is  better  to  translate  the  mere  words 
into  the  worshipping  belief  that  my  little  garrison  in  the 
Lofoi  Fort  is  encircled  by  the  same  shining  legions  of  light. 

But  what's  that  ?    Ay,  what  is  it  ?    A  yell  growing 
louder  and  louder,  and  craning  my  neck  on  the  bastion 
I  can  spy  the  sleeping  Haussa  quarters  vomiting  out  long 
strings  of  yelling  women,  the  absent  soldiers'  wives  these 
who  can  bear  the  suspense  no  longer.   All  night  they  have 
debated  the  fortunes  of  war ;  for  ten  hours  they  have 
wrangled  over  an  ugly  rumour  down  from  the  hills,  and 
sit  still  any  longer  they  cannot.    A  huge  Amazon  leads 
them  in  a  wild  war-dance,  and  lining  out  four  abreast, 
club  in  hand,  they  start  at  the  double  round  the  Fort, 
roaring  out  a  taunt-song  against  the  Arabs.    Round  they 
go,  once,  twice,  thrice,  roaring  out  their  wrath  in  song ; 
every  yell  supposed  to  energise  their  absent  husbands 
and  win  the  victory — cataracts  of  vituperation,  torrents 
of  curses !    They  cannot  pray,  and  they  have  gulped 
down  their  anger  too  long  ;  now  for  the  solemn  institution 
of  this  early  morning    curse  "-meeting  when  they  dance 
the  Devil's  wild  fandango.    Nearly  naked  and  wholly 
wild,  the  flap,  flap  of  their  pendant  dugs  is  made  to 
rhyme  with  the  thud  of  their  feet  and  the  flourish  of 
the  clubs.    Then  having  encompassed  the  walls  of  their 
imaginary  Jericho  three  times,  off  the  Amazons  rush  to 
the  river  for  morning  bath,  splashing  among  the  crocodiles 


330 


THINKING  BLACK 


i 


with  never  a  twinge  of  fear.  The  Devil's  matins  these 
became,  my  morning  hymn  drowned  by  their  morning 
curses.  Glad  was  I  when;  one  day,  far  up  the  hills  I 
heard  the  bugle  of  the  retreating  column,  and  in  an  hour 
they  filed  past  to  relieve  me  of  corroding  care. 

But  here,  as  elsewhere,  the  loyal  law  of  compensation 
avails.  Distasteful  business  this  soldiering  was  for  a 
Missionary,  yet  even  here  I  get  my  royal  revenge.  For 
years  afterwards  I  was  permitted  to  chaplain  these 
troops,  many  of  whom  were  my  old  soldiers.  A  wild 
lot  they  were :  cannibals,  hundreds  of  them,  who 
subsequently  revolted  and  murdered  their  white  officers. 
When  Baron  Dhanis,  the  Belgian  Commandant  (an  old 
Greenock  boy,  like  myself)  broke  the  back  of  the  Arab 
domination,  he  little  dreamed  what  a  defeat  he  organised 
out  of  his  victory,  by  permitting  the  crass  crime  of 
"converting"  these  cannibals  into  the  soldiers  of  a 
civilised  state.  In  delusion  and  confusion  he  caused 
these  old  Arab  cut-throats  to  be  enrolled  en  masse, 
the  veneer  of  the  barracks,  smart  uniform  and  deadly 
Albinis  only  helping  to  hide  the  horrible  man-eater 
wrapped  up  in  this  official  envelope.  Conversion,  for- 
sooth, this  was  called,  as  though  the  wolf  in  sheep's 
clothing  has  lost  the  old  appetite  for  mutton.  No 
wonder  the  march  of  events  soon  swept  dozens  of 
young  Belgians  into  the  cannibal  pots  :  Leroy,  Inver 
Mellen,  Andriane,  Louis  Dhanis,  and  many  others.^ 

•  The  Kubsequerit  regime  liy  Governor  Wangermee  ami  his  successor 
was  a  true  triumph  of  eaue,  solid  methods.    Bravo  !  Belgium. 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  331 

The  same  grotesque  contradiction  could  be  seen  when 
Baron  Dhanis  surprised  and  beat  the  Arab  auxiliaries  at 
the  town  of  a  cannibal  cut-throat,  by  name  Bantubenge. 
"He  of  the  crowds"  this  cognomen  means,  and  seldom 
have  name  and  nature  reflected  each  other  so  well.  For 
crowds  there  were.  Now,  the  Arabs  were  bad,  but  here 
is  a  brute  who  dines  daily  on  "  black  beef,"  yet  this  is  the 
very  man  to  whose  tender  mercies  the  Baron  handed  over 
"hundreds"  of  young  children  ranging  in  tender  years 
from  two  to  seven,  and  even  ten.  Nearly  all  belonging  to 
Kitalo,  Dhanis  committed  the  unprecedented  error  of 
trusting  such  a  demon  with  the  custody  of  these  lost 
lambs.  Bantubenge — ugh  ! — whose  name  denotes  death. 
In  a  few  days  they  were  all  dead,  sold  for  a  piece  of 
handkerchief  to  his  hungry  cannibals.  Not  dozens  of 
children  but  hundreds,  for  the  Baron's  own  words  are  : 
"  Des  centaines  de  jeunes  enfants  de  2  a  7  et  meme  10  ans." 
This  was  the  famous  victory  of  the  5th  May,  but  all  these 
poor  innocents  delivered  (?)  from  the  joug  Arahe  would 
have  been  far  safer  with  their  old  masters.  In  other 
words,  and  without  euphemism,  the  terrible  truth  is  that 
when  these  Belgians  took  such  cannibals  under  their  wing 
as  auxiliaries,  cannibalism  became  a  thriving  semi- 
official concern.  They  even  condoned  their  eating  of  their 
own  black  fathers  and  mothers.  One  instance  of  this 
happened  during  the  attack  on  Gongo-Lutete  by  a  man 
from  Pania.  Stationed  as  guard,  he  shot  a  man  in  the 
dark  and  came  in  to  report.  In  the  interval  the  body 
was  brought  in,  and  what  was  the  guard's  surprise  to 


332  THINKING  BLACK  I 

find  that  he  had  killed  his  own  father,  "the  author  of 
his  days."  Now,  although  the  Commandant  gave 
orders  for  decent  burial,  what  did  the  son  do  but  pass 
along  the  remains  to  his  comrades  for  consumption ! 
Tribal  taboo  forbade  him  the  meal,  but  he  could  connive 
at  his  own  father's  disappearance  in  the  pots.  The 
volunteer  drummer  of  this  expedition  fared  no  better. 
He  disappeared,  and  some  conjectured  that  he  had  been 
kiUed  by  a  lurking  foe.  Not  at  all.  A  day  or  two  later 
he — all  digestive  apparatus  and  no  conscience — was  dis- 
covered dead  in  a  hut  by  the  side  of  a  half-consumed 
corpse.  Had  eaten  neither  wisely  nor  well — dined  him- 
self to  death,  in  fact. 

Only  a  week  later,  a  young  Batetela,  not  more  than 
fourteen  years  of  age,  came  up  to  the  Baron's  tent  when 
he  was  dining  and  borrowed  his  knife.  No  sooner  the 
possessor  of  his  weapon,  he  slipped  round  the  tent,  cut  the 
throat  of  a  little  girl,  three  or  four  years  old,  who  belonged  to 
him,  and  proceeded  to  cook  her.  Put  on  the  chain  as  he 
was,  this  punishment  was  neither  adequate  nor  exemplary, 
for  soon  a  number  of  children  began  to  disappear  in  the 
district.  Caught  again,  this  time  they  found  him  with  a 
bag  hanging  round  his  neck  and  the  leg  and  arm  of  a  young 
innocent.  He  was  shot.  No  wonder  many  of  these 
liberated  prisoners  felt  they  had  really  fallen  out  of 
the  Arab  frying-pan  into  the  roasting-fire  of,  so-called, 
liberation.  "  Prisoners  of  war  "  they  were  called,  most  of 
them  poor  naked  nobodies,  the  sport  of  each  new  political 
move  in  the  country.    The  "  nether  millstone  "  class  is 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  333 


their  title,  because  they  get  all  the  crushing.  Your  big 
Chief  escapes  in  Africa,  and  so  do  the  negro  gentry,  only 
the  scum  of  heathendom  left  to  bear  the  pangs  of  imprison- 
ment. Let  them  make  a  try  for  liberty  and  see  what 
befalls  them.  A  band  of  these  miserables  rushed  off  one 
day,  hoping  to  break  through  to  their  old  homes. 
"Deserters,"  they  were  called,  and  followed  up;  but  on 
asking  the  local  Chief  which  way  they  had  passed,  he 
pointed  eloquently  to  his  mouth  and  smacked  his  lips 
in  a  way  that  told  the  whole  story.  They  had  all  been 
eaten  save  one,  and  he  an  old  boy  of  Hinde's. 

More  rA'olte's  man-eating.  Rapidly  incriminating 
evidence  is  very  soon  forthcoming  on  this  marrow-freezing 
theme.  Here,  at  my  feet,  is  a  young  lad,  Lumba,  his 
story  at  sunset  appropriately  set  off  against  a  blood-red 
sky.  Parting  carefully  his  clotted  hair,  he  discloses  an 
ugly  hole  in  his  skull,  the  dig  this  from  a  cannibal  axe. 
As  serious  as  mathematics  he  makes  a  careful  count  of 
the  living  and  the  dead,  and  quite  eighty  of  his  friends 
were  cooked  and  eaten  before  his  eyes — licked  clean  up, 
bones  and  gravy.  Very  young  as  he  was,  these  blatant 
cannibals  offered  him  his  life  on  condition  that  he  would 
eat  his  own  brother,  and  twice  the  laddie  shut  his  little 
jaws  like  a  rat-trap  and  snapped  refusal.  This  vile  perse- 
cution ran  on  into  two  days,  and  if  Monday  saw  him 
treated  to  whips,  Tuesday  was  certainly  reserved  for  their 
scorpions.  Finally,  making  a  wild  dash  for  freedom, 
clean  over  the  pot  of  his  boiling  brother,  he  sprang  into 
the  bush,  the  cannibal  guard  sending  an  axe  whizzing 


334 


THINKING  BLACK 


into  his  skull — the  axe,  forsooth,  that  was  red  with  his 
own  brother's  blood  now  drinking  his.  Yet  still  he  ran 
on  for  dear  life,  a  large  ant-bear  hole  ultimately  affording 
a  very  inviting  shelter  from  the  hue-and-cry  in  the  forest. 
And  next  day  he  awoke  from  a  long  swoon  the  proud 
possessor  of  the  axe  that  split  his  skull — but  could  also 
split  firewood  for  a  needful  forest  fire  ! 

Enough  of  horrors,  do  you  say  ?  Well,  yes  ;  but  you 
cannot  give  an  idea  of  Lubaland  without  alluding  to 
them — and  I  can  only  hint  and  indicate.  To  make 
hideousness  more  hideous,  witness  a  man,  Lukatula  by 
name — history  will  spue  out  his  name  with  disgust ! 
— one  of  the  Belgian  revokes.  Supreme  he  among 
the  children  of  Cain.  All  around  Kavamba  Lake  he 
had  it  noised  that  the  white  men  were  a  low  lot 
because  they  ate  fowls,  for  what  was  the  domestic  fowl 
but  the  village  scavenger  ?  Only  human  flesh  was  worth 
eating,  for  was  it  not  true  that  only  man  was  careful  of 
what  he  ate  ?  As,  therefore,  man  alone  is  careful  of  what 
he  eats,  the  argument  ran  that  man  should  be  careful  to 
eat  man.  Pharisee  to  the  last  drop  of  blood  in  him,  here 
was  a  serious  sickener — human  flesh  the  only  pure  food  of 
the  race !  For  long  weary  months  this  diabolic  epicure 
had  his  scouts  out,  catching  strings  of  little  boys  and 
girls,  all  doomed  to  the  pot,  all  reckoned  titbits  !  Figures 
are,  I  know  too  well,  very  tricky  things  in  Africa,  but  it 
seems  sure  that  the  climax  of  all  these  uncanny  realities 
was  reached  here  in  this  sad  Lubaland  when  Lukatula 
shut  two  hundred  souls  in  a  house  and  roasted  them 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  335 


alive.  An  eerie,  weird,  and  awful  business  to  reflect 
on,  here  you  have  cannibalism  in  full  flower  and  blooming 
in  torture  —  two  hundred  men,  women,  and  children 
penned  up  in  a  mud  house,  the  terrible  thatched  roof 
sent  roaring  up  in  flames.  But  surely,  you  suggest,  a 
feeling  of  shame  shot  hotly  through  the  murderer  as  he 
beheld  these  two  hundred  Lubans  in  articulo  mortis'^. 
The  obvious  answer  is  that  what,  to  us,  is  a  nightmare 
and  tragedy  is  to  him  something  far  diff'erent — a  whiff 
of  roasting  viands  from  the  Devil's  kitchen,  nothing  more. 
Quite  civilised  in  his  way,  this  man's  favourite  plate  is 
appropriately  an  enamel  soup-dish  from  the  West  Coast, 
centred  with  the  King  of  Portugal's  crown,  and  encircled 
by  the  Portuguese  colours.  A  reeking  mackintosh  his 
fashionable  garment  under  vertical  rays,  over  which  he 
slings  a  very  horsy  pair  of  field-glasses.  Granted  (and 
gladly)  this  was  a  very  special  blaze  of  barbarity,  specially 
wanton  I  mean,  what  was  the  cause  ?  Merely  the  shaving 
of  the  cannibal's  head  after  a  long  spell  of  letting  his  hair 
grow  long.  Month  after  month  had  passed  and  Luka- 
tula's  fast  -  grizzling  wool  was  ominously  allowed  to 
grow  unchecked,  dark  hints  thrown  out  that  the  day  of 
his  head-shaving  would  be  "  the  day  of  many  tears." 
And  come  it  did,  that  close  shave  of  his  head  beinsr 
equivalent  to  a  closer  shave  to  many  whose  lives  that 
day  were  in  jeopardy. 

Here  in  September  you  have  white  African  winter, 
but  it  is  the  whiteness  of  electric  light  and  as  hot  as  an 
engine-room.    Compared  with  Africa  our  English  shiver- 


336 


THINKING  BLACK 


ing  summer  is  not  summer  at  all,  it  is  only  Richter's 
"  winter  painted  green."    A  woman,  Mrs.  Horns,  tells  me 
that  farther  North  she  went  with  her  sister  to  take  the 
village  tribute  to  the  Chief  Chofwe,  and  they  slept  two 
nights  in  the  district  capital.    Chofwe  sent  along  to  their 
quarters  and  regretted  his  not  having  a  fat  goat  to  send 
them  for  the  cooking-pot :  was  therefore  compelled  to 
send  them,  with  apologies,  a  shivering  naked  boy — as 
substitute  for  soup  !    Here  it  is  this  lady  Masengo  presses 
a  point  to  the  honour  of  negro  womankind ;  insists  that 
no  woman  ever  did  eat  human  flesh,  that  the  men  only 
do  so,  that  a  woman  defies  any  man  to  bring  "  man-meat " 
into  her  house,  and  that  all  her  household  pots  are  in- 
violate.   This  witness  is  true.     The  rule  is  that  the 
cannibal  club  resort  to  the  dark  "groves"  (Mushitu),  and 
there  they  keep  a  special  supply  of  large  pots  for  their 
revels.    The  town  ladies  are  jealous  of  it  all,  and  insist 
that  these  men  are  unclean  until  the  village  priest  cere- 
moniously cleanses  them  after  "  the  red  mania."  This 
means  that  blocking  the  path  of  their  return  to  the  town 
is  the  purging  process  by  which  alone  the  man  "  unclean 
by  a  dead  body  "  can  enter  his  own  house.    Indeed,  priest 
or  no  priest,  many  a  wife  sues  at  law  many  a  husband  for 
his  man-eating  orgies,  any  stroke  of  bad  luck  in  her  house 
being  traceable  to  the  dead  man  eaten  by  her  husband. 
"The  dead  do  not  really  die,"  say  they.    But  no  sigh  of 
sorrow,  mark  you.    It  is  all  No.  1,  and  a  fear  that  the 
dead  man  will  haunt  the  living  to  his  undoing. 

Another  aspect  of  cannibalism.    All  Lubans  are  not 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  337 


as  brave  in  initiative  as  the  lion  and  the  leopard,  and 
hence  the  institution  of  the  cannibal  vampire,  the  human 
hyenas  who  feed  upon  the  dead.  These  are  the  cowards 
of  the  cult  who  prowl  among  the  tombs.  Up  here  in  the 
Butembo  forest  you  have  a  weird  old  man  living  in  the 
woods,  a  solitary  and  cynic,  the  human  steaks  hanging  in 
the  smoke  of  his  faggot-fire.  This  old  vampire  once  upon  a 
time  played  the  lion,  and  killed  brother-man  as  fair  prey, 
but  now  he  has  descended  in  the  scale  :  prowess  all  gone, 
a  vampire  hyena,  nothing  more.  Other  cannibals  eat  the 
produce  of  their  own  vine  and  fig-tree  caught  in  fair  fight, 
but  this  old  vampire  can  only  haunt  the  dead.  These 
tomb-haunters  are  curious  in  one  respect.  They,  too, 
sing  a  dirge  of  exhumation,  a  curiously  perverse  song  like 
the  perversity  of  their  "owl-deed"  (sic).  The  idea  in 
this  dirge  is  a  conciliating  of  the  supposed  dead  man's 
resentment  at  being  so  disturbed  in  his  sleep  of  death. 
This  dirge  is  uttered  in  the  moonlight  with  a  sepulchral 
whine,  and  runs — 

"  Va  Jika  mu  Kanwa 
Panshi  va  tina  Mwashi." 

"  We  rescue  thee,  0  corpse,  from  the  cold  wet  ground,  and 
honour  thee  with  mouth-interment." 

An  old  friend  of  mine,  the  Chief  Swiva,  had  a  creeping 
experience  of  this  song,  and  was  once  very  nearly  cut  up 
in  error  by  these  very  vampires,  all  because  he  feigned  to 
be  dead.  You  doubtless  demur  and  ask  why  any  reputable 
man  could,  should,  or  would  pretend  to  be  dead  ;  but 

21 


338 


THINKING  BLACK 


that  is  where  this  too  true  story  comes  in.    The  facts  are 
demonstrable  data,  "chiels  that  winna  ding,"  and  thus 
they  run.    The  village  of  this  Chief  Swiva  had  the  mis- 
fortune to  lie  on  the  trunk  road,  and  was  thus  much 
harassed  by  passing  Government  caravans  plundering  his 
people.    Of  course,  in  those  days,  before  the  splendid 
Wangerm^e  regime,  very  many  of  the  State  soldiers  were 
frank  cannibals  who  would  travel  with  a  smoked  human  arm 
or  the  like  tied  to  their  load — Katondo,  for  instance,  did  so 
at  Muntemune  and  to  my  knowledge.    Thus  the  endless 
rebuffs  and  indignities  from  such  a  horde  of  brutes  made 
Swiva  long  to  lala  dimo,  as  he  put  it,  i.e.  to  die  and  be 
done  with  it.    But  suicide  is  an  unworthy  death  for  a 
chief,  and  the  negro  is  a  creature  of  monkey  expedients,  y 
so  he  slowly  matures  a  plan.    Why  not  a  mock  funeral  ? 
Why  not  sham  sickness  and  death  and  burial  ?    Do  not  all 
the  local  spiders,  dor  beetles  and  genus  Elater,  feign  death 
like  a  fox  when  touched  ?   Thus  the  weary  months  pass,  and 
finally  poor  old  Swiva  sees  no  hope  of  peace  ahead  save  in 
simulating  death.    This  he  resolves  to  do,  and  one  daring 
day  the  false  death-wail  goes  up  at  midnight ;  a  wail 
this  ostentatiously  prolonged  throughout  the  next  day. 
Visitors  pass  in  and  out  of  the  village  bemoaning  a 
faithful  friend  departed,  and  there,  in  the  dark  mud  hut, 
swathed  in  his  sham  shroud,  lies  the  malingering  old 
Swiva,  heaving  gently  to  the  systole  and  diastole  of  a 
hard  but  sad  old  heart.    (The  King  is  dead,  0  ye  negroes 
not  in  The  Know,  yet  long  live  the  King !)    But  the 
fiasco  of  it  all  is  now  about  to  be  made  manifest,  for  far 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS 


339 


along  the  road  comes  the  well-known  yell  of  advancing 
soldiers  :  a  yell  this  that  stabs  Swiva  to  the  bone  and 
makes  the  shamming  corpse  lie  as  still  as  the  real  thing. 
And  now  they  pour  into  the  bereaved  (?)  village,  the 
cannibal  song  drowning  the  mock  death-wail  —  what 
next  ?  The  dance  begins  outside  the  Chiefs  house,  a 
dance  jigged  to  a  vampire  song  telling  of  the  singer's 
deadly  intent.  Be  assured,  0  my  reader,  that  w^henever 
the  double  entente  of  that  dark  song  reached  poor 
Swiva's  ears,  as  he  lay,  tied  up  like  a  mummy  in  six  mats, 
he  wished  he  were  really  dead,  and  not  shamming  it. 
But  Swiva  is  a  man  of  sixty  summers,  and  there  lies  the 
wily  old  Chief  motionless,  still  hoping  against  hope  that  the 
wild  protestations  of  his  own  people  outside  will  restrain 
the  cannibals  from  making  a  sorry  supper  oflF  his  body. 
Ah,  now  it  is  the  song  he  so  often  laughed  over  begins 
to  be  crooned  over  his  own  creeping  flesh. 

"  We  rescue  thee,"  crooned  the  dirge,  "  0  corpse, 
from  the  cold  wet  ground,  and  honour  thee  with  mouth- 
interment." 

What  happens  ?  Poor  old  hypothetically  dead  Swiva 
through  a  chink  in  his  mummy-wrappings  sees  the  gleam 

of  a  knife,  and  nay,  not  one  word  more  dare  I  add. 

Sufficient  if  I  hereby  officially  inform  you  that  all  the 
smothered  wrongs  and  amenities  of  a  down-trodden  Chief 
were  uttered  in  that  one  rending  shriek  of  Swiva.  In 
scorn,  he  tore  the  trappings  of  the  grave  from  him,  and 
in  deadly  fear  the  cannibals  tore  out  of  the  Chiefs  hut. 
Needless  to  say,  as  from  the  dead,  he  did  there  and  then 


340 


THINKING  BLACK 


arise  a  model  Chief,  with  a  new-born  dignity  that  would 
brook  no  nonsense.  Ever  since  his  day  of  simulated 
death  Chief  Swiva,  in  fact,  has  been  very  much  alive. 

Where  are  we,  then  ?    What  are  your  cannibal's  latent 
ideas  of  things  ?    Or  is  this  man-eating  merely  a  vulgar 
expedient  to  satisfy  the  qualms  of  hunger  ?    Here  is  a 
cannibal  at  my  elbow  who  will  tell  us  all.    When  I  ask 
him  about  Budianane  (the  technical  term  this),  he  tem- 
porises, of  course,  in  the  usual  cannibal  way.  However, 
as  he  has  exactly  the  look  of  the  cat  that  has  been  at  the 
milk,  he  soon  breaks  the  sorry  seal  of  confession.  Now, 
all  that  man's  story  is  simply  the  old  bundle  of  contra- 
dictions, for  the  subject  of  cannibalism  halves  in  two  like 
an  orange  :  on  the  one  hand  the  greedy,  omnivora  who 
must  have  broth ;  on  the  other  hand  a  whole  priesthood 
ritual  with  human  flesh  as  the  buttress  idea.    All  this,  of 
course,  is  typically  African  ;  for  as  we  saw,  see,  and  shall 
see,  the  concrete  and  abstract  are  inseparable  :  "  shadowing  " 
each  other  is  the  literal  idea  we  see  in  the  Bantu  abstract 
prefix.    The  coarse  concrete  side  of  man-eating,  then,  is 
simply  the  African  carrying  out  the  "beast-precedents" 
to  a  legitimate  conclusion.     Granted  there  are  beasts 
major  and  beasts  minor,  but  the  negro  at  once  schedules 
himself  down  among  the  carnivora.    Is  not  (he  argues) 
human  war  merely  man  the  carnivorous  shedding  blood  like 
the  lion  and  leopard  ?     The  big  animal  grabs  at  the 
little  one  even  as  the  big  negro  swallows  the  small  one : 
the  deduction  is  therefore  inexorable  that  you  must  eat 
what  you  kill.    Again,  and  yet  again,  have  I  heard 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  341 

cannibals  taunt  non-cannibals  with  the  mere  wanton 
killing  in  war  and  yet  not  eating  what  they  kill.  This 
taunt  is  technically  embalmed  in  the  phrase,  Shikani 
Yanyoka  =  the  (wanton)  hatred  of  the  snake,  the  point, 
of  course,  being  that  a  snake  merely  spits  its  virus  with 
deadly  intent  to  kill,  and  not  at  all  with  an  honest  desire 
to  dine  oflf  the  carcass.  Hence  the  great  Kansanshi 
cannibal  club  sings  a  song  in  this  same  strain  at  their 
revels  :  but  to  catch  the  idea  of  this  cannibal  apologia  I 
must  put  the  words  into  the  melting-pot  and  recast  the 
song  in  our  own  English  rhyme : — 

"  Other  men  only  kill  like  the  snake, 
They  kill,  nota  bene,  for  killing's  sake; 
The  Kansamhi,  however,  make  no  mistake, 
They  kill  to  partake  of  a  human  steak." 

Plainly,  then,  the  taunt  is  obvious,  and  really  amounts 
to  the  plea  that  if  people  must  indulge  in  the  madness  of 
man-slaying,  then  they  should  have  method  in  their 
madness  and  follow  up  the  man-slaying  with  man-eating. 
"  To  botanise  on  one's  mother's  grave  "  is  a  poor  sarcasm 
to  a  cannibal  :  in  Lubalaud  they  make  a  supper  out  of  it. 
The  idea,  then,  that  genus  homo  is  merely  one  of  the 
carnivora  is  deeply  actuating  them  in  their  gruesome 
deeds.  Yet  how  wonderfully  the.se  folks  listen  !  Here  is 
a  puzzle  of  an  audience,  for  all  seem  to  enjoy  the  Gospel 
of  Peace,  yet  sure  am  I  not  one  of  the  crowd  enjoys 
the  peace  of  the  Gospel.  They  swallow  the  sermon  but 
reject  the  salvation — problem,  to  find  the  reason  of  this. 


342 


THINKING  BLACK 


After  plying  them  with  questions,  I  find  the  answer  is  as 
old  as  the  days  when  the  common  people  heard  Christ 
gladly.  It  is  surely  this  :  all  other  religions  under  the 
sun  make  man  seek  God ;  this  Gospel  I  preach  whets  their 
curiosity,  because  God  is  seen  seeking  man.  Beyond  all 
doubt  there  is  such  a  thing  as  the  scientific  study  of 
comparative  religions,  but  Christianity  is  not  one  of  them. 
There  is  only  one  Gospel :  there  are  many  religions. 

I  gladly  drop  the  curtain  on  these  sorry  deeds,  and 
would  now  proceed  to  business — the  Master's  surely — by 
pointing  out  that,  with  this  new  complication  of  revolt, 
our  road  North  is  as  straitly  shut  as  the  road  West, 
We  have  no  alternative  but  to  look  East  for  succour. 
Yet,  even  there,  the  circle  of  Cain  is  closing  in  on  us,  for 
what  is  the  East  but  the  Arab  headquarters  ?    We  may 
seek  to  ignore  them,  but  they  never  forget  us.  Indeed, 
precisely  now,  with  cold,  concentrated  malice,  they  are 
shutting  us  in  from  three  different  points  on  the  Eastern 
skyline  :  Muruturutu  in  the  North-East,  Shimba  due  East, 
and  Chiwala  moving  up  from  the  South-East.  Chuckling 
with  glee  that  their  old  slaves  the  rebel  Belgian  soldiers 
have  voted  for  slavery,  they  are  now  advancing  to  join 
hands  with  the  Biheans  and  wipe  us  out,  the  compact,  of 
course,  to  be  sealed  in  blood — our  blood.    Thus,  North, 
South,  East,  and  West,  the  Devil  is  making  a  bold  bid  to 
win  back  the  vast  Interior  to  its  old  allegiance  to  slavery, 
the  Arab  in  particular  being  bent  on  having  nothing  less 
than  a  huge  dividend-swelling  concern.     But  if  the 


OUR  EASTERN  EXODUS  343 

sufferings  abound,  so  too  the  consolations,  and  like  a 
whiff  of  ozone  from  the  Indian  Ocean  comes  the  whisper 
that  the  British  are  actually  working  up  into  the  Interior. 
How  my  heart  goes  pit-a-pat  at  the  news !    One  Arab, 
with  a  glassy  stare,  even  tells  me  tremblingly  that — 
news !  news ! — they  have  already  laid  siege  to  Mulozi's 
stronghold,  and  if  we  are  in  high  glee  he  is  in  high 
dudgeon  at  the  tidings.    Like  a  toothless  negress,  who 
will  never  see  anything  to  laugh  at,  this  besieging  of 
their  Karonga  headquarters  is  a  hard  knock  at  my  Arab 
informant.    Who  will  cash  his  ivory  cheques  now,  seeing 
Mulozi  his  old  pawnbroker  is  nearly  bankrupt  ?  The 
shrinking  of  the  planet  is  proverbial,  and  here  is  another 
proof  of  the  smallness  of  our  globe.    Our  whole  concern 
now  is  how  to  successfully  wriggle  out  East  by  crossing 
the  Arab  lines  and,  suh  silentio,  join  hands  with  our  own 
British  kin.    The  problem  of  route,  however,  is  a  minor  one 
compared  with  the  problem  of  secrecy,  for  in  Africa  a 
mere  glance  is  like  proclaiming  everything  at  Charing 
Cross.     With    this    triumphant    reactionary  majority 
hemming  us  in,  the  stern  demand  is  to  be  as  secret  as 
the  grave,  for  in  Africa  three  can  keep  a  secret  only  when 
two  of  them  are  dead.    So,  too,  with  any  new  venture  such 
as  this  projected  breaking  through  to  the  East,  for  every 
three  conspirators  you  can  always  reckon  on  four  spies. 

Therefore,  on  the  native  principle  of  "  not  setting  your 
snare  while  the  partridges  are  looking  on,"  I  slip  off 
towards  the  East  like  a  thief  in  the  night,  the  outline  of  a 
plan  dawning  hazily  on  my  mind.    All  my  movements 


344 


THINKING  BLACK 


are  necessarily  of  the  non-committal  kind.  Yonder, 
across  the  Lufira  Flats  are  the  red  ramparts  of  Kunde- 
lungu.  There  the  Lord  maketh  you  to  ride  on  the  high 
places  of  the  earth,  a  great  unbroken  wall  of  uniform 
height  lying  athwart  the  Eastern  trail  as  far  as  the  eye 
can  reach.  Beyond  that  tableland  is  Kavanga,  "  the 
Eternal  Gates  of  the  Morning,"  the  Africa  of  the  Great 
Lakes  and  our  own  English  kinsmen.  Why  should  not 
the  West  join  hands  with  the  East  ?  And  this  is  how  we 
do  it. 


CHAPTER  XVni 
Boring  out  East 


"As  far  as  the  East  is  from  the  West." 


* 


« 


They  pitched  their  tents  towards  the  sun-rising." 


"O,  the  little  birds  sang  East,  and  the  little  birds 
sang  West; 

And  I  smiled  to  think  God's  goodness  flows  around 

our  incompleteness- 
Round  our  restlessness,  His  rest" 


« 


♦ 


* 


"All  these  things 
are  against  me." 

Gen.  xlii.  j6. 


"All  things  work 
together  for  good." 


346 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


Boring  out  East 

HEREIN^  Mushidi  being  dead 
and  done  withy  the  perilous  pro- 
cess begins  called  "boring  out.'' 

EARING  this  plateau  wall,  the  blue  blur  sharpens 
into  bold  black  lines,  and  you  soon  find  it  swerv- 
ing from  a  straight  N.  and  S.  course  to  form 
many  a  large  "  dream  "  valley  down  which  roars  an  angry 
torrent  from  the  watershed.  "  Box  canons  "  all  of  them, 
and  shaped  like  a  U,  with  occasionally  a  sharp-shaped  V. 
The  river  long  ago  dug  out  these  ravines  and  is  now 
wriggling  down  the  middle  like  an  S.  Hamlets  crouching 
in  the  reeds  on  either  side  of  the  river-bed  dot  these 
valleys  sparsely,  the  people  all  high-strung  and  excited. 
Mugavi,  a  nervous  little  quicksilver  man,  is  very  kind  as 
we  pass  through  his  place,  and  there  is  a  curious  loadstone 
of  affinity  when  black  and  white  thus  defeat  Babel  by 
chatting  in  a  common  lingo.  You  seem  to  walk  straight 
into  each  other's  hearts.  To  be  tongue-tied  as  to  the 
negro's  language  means  that  an  unnavigable  ocean  washes 
between  your  two  souls,  cutting  you  off  from  converse : 


348 


THINKING  BLACK 


was  it  not  when  Paul  spoke  to  the  mob  in  their  own 
Hebrew  tongue,  "  they  kept  the  more  silence "  ?  The 
women  are  nearly  naked,  and  seemingly  not  at  all 
troubled  with  the  European  quibble  of  frocks  and  frills. 
One  dowager,  who  queened  the  town,  beat  them  all,  but 
she  only  attained  to  short  ballet-dancer's  skirts  of  skin. 

Here  is  a  Nimrod  chief,  a  man  of  muscle  who  boasts 
a  good  kennel  of  hunting  dogs,  the  objects  of  his  extreme 
solicitude.  Their  trophies  are  exhibited,  from  wild  boar 
to  roan  antelope,  and  he  starves  them,  paradoxically,  to 
feed  their  ferocity,  not,  as  he  explains  apologetically,  out 
of  neglect.  One  of  the  curious  category  of  upstart 
"hunter-chiefs"  this,  the  tendency  being  for  even  a 
stripling  who  has  killed  his  half-dozen  elephants  to  en- 
trench himself  inside  a  stockade  of  bamboos.  Good  shots, 
all  of  them,  they  vulgarise  kingship  and  claim  to  preside 
over  the  destinies  of  their  own  hamlet — and  the  next 
man's.  Meantime  the  real  Lord  Paramount  sits  stony 
and  stern  inside  his  own  stockade,  plotting  young  Nim- 
rod's  downfall. 

This  chief  sends  his  two  sleek  young  sons  with  me, 
"to  see  the  Great  Lake  and  River":  it  is  their  first 
journey  in  life,  and  they  are  all  a-quiver  with  vanity  at  the 
prospect  of  actually  seeing  the  great  unknown  East.  So 
there,  with  the  moon  hanging  overhead  like  a  great  Chinese 
lantern,  we  have  a  farewell  meeting  :  all  agape,  they  listen 
as  I  sermonise  them  on  the  sacred  subject  of  a  God  who 
80  loves  their  soul  and  so  hates  their  sin.  On  the  morrow, 
in  the  Kasanga  Valley,  a  large  house  was  struck  with 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


349 


lightning  and  several  people  fell  insensible  to  the  ground. 
The  owner  of  the  hut  turned  up  at  my  meeting  and  wildly 
controverted  some  of  the  things  I  was  saying  on  God's 
love  ;  describing  the  lightning  incident  as  "  God  coming 
down  with  red  eyes."  The  old  African  heresy  this,  that 
equates  "God"  with  "wrath"  {bukadi).  Instead  of 
catching  up  this  negro  on  a  mere  technicality,  however,  I 
at  once  conciliated  my  man  by  admitting  that  Nature 
could  be  cold  and  cruel,  but  that  "  herein  is  Love  :  not 
that  we  loved  God  (one  fraction  of  a  bit),  but  that  He  loved 
us."  Across  mountain  and  flood,  marsh  and  meadow,  one 
moaning  voice  is  heard  in  Africa,  "  No  man  hath  seen  God 
at  any  time  "  :  that  is  all  the  so-called  gospel  of  Nature 
can  do  for  the  negro.  X.B. — Short  all  these  sermons  of 
ours  must  be,  for  in  Africa  if  you  exhaust  your  subject 
you  easily  exhaust  your  hearers.  "  For  a  running  deer,  a 
running  shot "  is  their  preacher's  proverb  on  brevity,  and 
in  fifteen  minutes  the  sermon  should  be  done — no,  not 
that ;  I  mean  the  preacher  should  be  done,  for  often  it 
takes  fifteen  years  for  the  fifteen  minutes'  sermon  to 
be  done. 

Curious  that  these  "  sous  of  the  mountains "  have 
lightning  conductors  in  the  form  of  a  tall  bamboo,  and 
their  idea  is  that  lightning  is  not  a  fluid,  but  a  dragon 
(Kalumha)  ranging  the  skies,  and  specially  attracted  by  a 
bamboo  rod. 

The  "  goatway  "  as  it  approaches  the  Kana  rivulet  is 
laid  out  with  such  masterly  cunning  and  trickery  that  you 
dare  not  escalade  the  mountain  except  in  the  wake  of  a 


350 


THINKING  BLACK 


negro  who  is  "in  the  know."  The  Valomotwa  can  crawl 
flat  on  their  bellies  year  in  and  year  out,  under  the  trunks 
of  trees  purposely  felled  to  hoodwink  strangers.  Breaking 
through  grass,  thev  walk  backwards  and  restore  each  blade 
to  its  natural  position,  defying  wit  of  man  to  know  where 
they  have  gone.  To-day  I  chanced  on  a  mountaineer 
doing  this  crafty  thing,  and  peeping  at  him  with  oblique 
glances  of  the  eye  saw  his  triumph  of  trickery.  That  tell- 
tale grass  he  put  as  softly  aside  as  a  surgeon  parts  the  hair 
to  examine  a  scalp  wound,  the  result  being  a  clever  fraud 
in  trail-hiding.  Even  thus  do  your  troubles  multiply,  for 
the  local  negro  is  endlessly  laying  all  his  plans  with  con- 
summate care  in  order  to  trap  the  pioneer. 

But  African  troubles  are  like  African  babies,  they  grow 
bigger  if  you  nurse  them,  and  the  morning,  brings  counsel. 
Tumbling  out  early,  you  negotiate  the  Kundelungu  wall 
with  the  wind  whistling  through  the  trees.    Most  clutch 
at  a  faggot  from  the  roaring  camp-fire,  and  up  this 
mountain  staircase  we  wind,  the  said  faggot  held  off  to 
windward  so  that  the  play  of  the  wind  sends  a  tongue  of 
flame  licking  the  bare  black  body.    Anon,  and  far  up  the 
mountain,  you  hear  a  triumph  "  coo  ! "  from  the  summit, 
half  taunt,  half  brag,  from  a  dwarf  negro  who  is  first  up. 
The  lean,  lanky  six  feet  of  humanity  in  front  of  me  laughs 
at  the  idea  of  the  dwarf  being  for  once  "  the  tallest  man 
in  the  caravan  "  ;  and  probably  our  Tom  Thumb  was  right, 
after  all,  when  he  answered  their  taunts  by  saying,  like 
Lincoln,  "A  man's  legs  ought  to  be  long  enough  to  reach 
the  ground."    Breathing  as  loud  as  a  forge  bellows,  here 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


351 


we  are  at  last  on  the  top,  just  in  time  to  greet  the  sun 
coming  up  over  it  at  the  same  time  as  ourselves,  a  crisp 
and  cross  east  wind  blowing  in  our  teeth.  Rocks,  grasses, 
and  trees  have  all  caught  the  flame  of  the  morning. 
Yonder,  far  below,  Kasanga  Valley  lies  at  our  feet,  villages 
looking  mere  dots  on  a  map,  the  river  a  thin  thread 
wandering  through  an  expanse  of  green  and  gold.  Out 
through  the  valley  mouth  the  Lufira  Flats  stretch  away, 
far,  far  away  to  the  West,  the  vast  panorama  dramatically 
opening  out  to  its  very  widest  by  way  of  tragic  farewell. 
For  this,  mark  you,  means  a  long  "good-bye"  to  that 
Western  slave-track  and  the  wide  waste  of  lonely  land 
stretching  out  to  the  Atlantic. 

Early  the  next  day  we  reach  the  Eastern  edge,  and  in 
order  to  keep  a  resolve  really  to  meet  the  Valomotwa  in 
their  own  holes,  we  left  the  trail  in  tow  of  one  of  the 
sagest  guides  I  have  ever  known.  I  have  the  honour  to 
appraise  you  of  the  fact  that  we  followed  this  falcon-eyed 
"  path-borer  "  as  meekly  as  sheep  follow  their  bell-wethers. 
And  the  result  ?  A  long  day's  game  at  explorer's  bo-peep, 
rolling  about  among  the  rocks  on  the  steep  brow  of  the 
range.  Thin  saplings  cut  obliquely,  and  left  half  severed, 
were  the  unerring  guide  all  along  the  route,  the  sort  of 
"  scent  "  this  in  a  very  heathen  paper-chase.  Without 
this  key  to  the  labyrintli  our  quest  would  have  been 
hopeless  beyond  all  conjecture,  but  with  it  the  eye  gets 
accustomed  to  the  arrangement,  and  wc  are  conducted 
along  expectantly  from  one  cut  sapling  to  another,  until 
noiselessly  and  suddenly  we  arc  really  on  them,  escape 


352 


THINKING  BLACK 


impossible.  The  men  spring  for  their  quivers  of  bulemhe 
(poison)  arrows,  opining  we  are  Shimba's  Rugarugas, 
but  I  approach  empty-handed  and  ask,  scoldingly  and 
indignantly  enough,  what  they  mean  by  fleeing  incon- 
tinently from  us,  their  bona  fide  visitors.  As  if  by  magic, 
their  demeanour  is  now  cowed  and  respectful,  as  though 
they  realise  the  game  is  up  ;  for  here,  on  the  lonely  frontiers 
of  the  world,  could  they  flee  farther  or  higher  ?  Later, 
and  they  are  ashamed  of  themselves,  treating  us  with  real 
Highland  hospitality :  we  have  outwitted  their  black 
Vigilance  Committee,  and  the  whole  visit  turns  out  rather 
resembling  the  proverbial  month  of  March — in  like  a  lion, 
and  out  like  a  lamb.  Moral :  In  Africa  a  storm  can  clear 
the  air  and  does  not  always  prophesy  bad  weather.  We 
were  not  the  predatory  creatures  of  their  dreams,  and  how 
could  I  blame  them  for  thus  taking  refuge  in  their  "  muni- 
tions of  rocks,"  then  springing  up  to  eat  us,  not  to  greet 
us  ?  Did  not  our  own  early  Britons  flee  back  before  the 
advancing  Saxons  and  hide  themselves  in  the  mountain 
fastnesses  of  wild  Wales  ? 

Another  thing.  It  very  soon  leaks  out  that  this  hamlet 
we  have  struck  is  only  one  of  many — that,  in  fact,  the 
rocks,  like  rabbit-warrens,  swarm  with  people,  who  file  in 
looking  daggers  and  grudging  us  their  secret. 

How  is  this  for  a  proof  that  the  whole  world  is  kin  ? 
Here,  where  never  white  saw  black  nor  black  saw  white, 
what  did  I  see  to-day  ?  Two  little  mountaineers,  speaking 
the  pure  Gaelic,  are  in  hot  and  high  dispute  over  some 
childish  matter.    "  All  right,  what  will  you  wager  ? "  asks  a 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


353 


three-feet-high  youngster  whose  brow  is  creased  in  a 
worried  little  frown.  "  I  bet  three  beads,"  retorts  his 
opponent,  and  forthwith  they  link  their  two  little  fingers 
of  the  right  hand  solemnly  to  conclude  the  Chipikwa,  or 
wager.  And  all  this  with  the  customary  placidity  of  the 
Epsom  racecourse — yes,  here  at  the  world's  end.  To  the 
tramp  Missionary  it  is  difficult  to  say  whether  one  is  more 
harassed  or  exhilarated  in  being  so  startlingly  reminded  of 
the  solidarity  of  the  race.  Is  it  not  the  tempter's  endless 
taunt  that  this  negro  of  ours  is  too  unlike  the  European 
even  faintly  to  understand  our  point  ?  Yet  little  do  these 
toy  gamblers  guess  that  they  are  tying  themselves  up  in 
the  same  bundle  with  all  the  absconding  clerks,  bank- 
tellers,  cashiers,  treasurers,  trustees,  and  speculators  who 
ever  put  their  money  on  the  wrong  horse.  Reflection  : 
So  the  old  round  world  is  kin  after  all. 

Gunpowder  has  never  reached  these  simple  folks,  and 
the  hunting  is  all  done  on  tiptoe  with  silent  poisoned 
arrows.  They  plead  that  one  bang  from  a  gun  would  be 
too  tell-tale,  booming  along  the  valley.  These  canons  of 
theirs  are  whispering  galleries,  that,  with  a  great  awaken- 
ing clang,  echo  and  re-echo  the  secret  of  even  the  hunter's 
footfall.  As  free  as  a  bird,  there  never  was  such  a  thing 
as  game  laws,  the  forest  being  called  Butala  wa  Leza,  or 
God's  larder.  The  innovation  of  English  game  laws  would 
be  high  treason,  for  do  they  not  say,  "  The  antelopes  were 
made  for  man,  not  man  for  the  antelopes"  ?  Sure  am  I  a 
black  local  parliament  would,  with  the  whole  force  of  its 
judgment  and  rhetoric,  annul  all  laws  against  hunting.  Err 


3&4 


THINKING  BLACK 


these  negro  politicians  no  doubt  would  in  many  pertinent 
particulars ;  bring  in  a  Bill  they  might,  to  call  winter 
summer  and  Friday  Tuesday,  but  as  for  game  laws !  And 
no  wonder,  for  to  the  black  man  of  the  woods  life's 
limitations  are  too  manifold  to  admit  of  such  a  serious 
restriction  as  venison.  The  negro  cup  is  small,  so  let  him 
fill  it  to  the  brim.  And  here,  once  again,  around  the 
flaming  faggots  I  send  out  the  old  shout  of  Salvation  among 
these  Kundelungu  glens.  Although  weary  to  the  marrow 
of  my  bones,  the  very  thought  of  the  rocks  thrilling  for 
the  first  time  with  God's  praise  is  enough  to  rouse  an  echo 
thrill  in  one's  cold  old  heart.  As  you  muse  the  fire  burns, 
and  then  it  is  you  pour  out  on  them  the  flood  of  longing 
entreaty,  the  whole  ministry  reacting  on  your  sickly  soul 
like  a  bracing  tonic.  Thus  do  we  drink  of  the  brook  by 
the  way.  Why  doubt  that  after  many  days  the  blessing 
will  come  ?  Grey  and  gloomy  and  grand  the  forest  arches 
over  us,  each  tree  preaching  to  us  the  old  sermon  of  the 
oak.  Which  runs  :  The  creation  of  a  thousand  forests  is 
in  one  acorn.  After  all,  you  may  count  the  apples  on  a 
tree,  but  can  you  count  the  trees  in  even  one  apple  ? 

(Later.) 

Yes !  and  come  it  did,  for  fourteen  long  years  after- 
wards wonderful  news  reaches  the  Lufira  Flats  from 
these  very  hills.  Down  comes  a  man  with  a  long 
string  knotted  into  more  than  thirty  knots.  Each  of 
these  knots,  be  it  known,  represents  a  man  or  woman 
who  has  professed  conversion  to  Christ,  and  Mr.  and 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


355 


Mrs.  Anton  went  up  to  verify  the  strange  news  con- 
tained in  this  strange  mountaineer's  string  "  note-book." 
There  they  were,  women  in  the  majority,  on  the  same 
range  at  Lofoi,  praising  God  among  the  rocks ;  by  a  sort 
of  spiritual  spontaneous  combustion  the  heather  was  on 
fire.  For  the  Word  of  God  is  not  bound,  and  these  lonely 
hearts  were  profoundly  converted.  In  later  years,  on  Lake 
Mweru,  these  women  make  the  best  Evangelists.  Of  a 
Sunday  you  can  spy  some  old  negro  ladies  toddling  out  to 
the  suburbs,  a  six  or  eight  mile  walk,  in  order  to  pass  along 
their  good  news.  Look  closely  at  one  of  these  and  you  can 
see  the  dear  old  face  wreathed  in  most  contagious  smiles, 
the  very  manner  of  her  joy  proof  positive  that  she  has 
got  what  the  world  cannot  take  away.  With  her  there 
is  no  case  of  logic  versus  love,  for  lo !  k)ve  is  her  logic. 
Her  manner,  too,  so  nicely  balanced  between  boldness 
and  timidity. 

"Just  knows,  and  knows  no  more,  her  Bible  true, 
A  truth  the  brilliant  Frenchman  never  knew." 

("  Heart  "  is  a  word  that  the  Bible  is  just  full  of.  "  Brain," 
I  believe,  is  not  once  mentioned.)  Theories  are  for  the 
human  brain,  but  the  human  heart  must  have  a  person, 
and  woe  to  this  old  dear  if  her  faith  has  not  given  her 
a  Person  to  talk  to  all  along  life's  weary  road,  for  her 
own  tribe  now  turns  the  cold  shoulder  on  her.  Say 
nearly  sixty  years  of  age  (on  the  wrong  side),  she  has 
wakened  up  to  realise  with  a  glad  surprise  that  God 
the  Multi-Millionaire   has   invested  all  His  capital  in 


356 


THINKING  BLACK 


her  soul.  The  night  is  fast  approaching  when  for  her 
there  can  be  no  work,  so  off  the  frail  old  saint  goes  with 
this  great  thought  energizing  her  journey  of  Evangel  into 
a  toddling  trot.  If  life  be  indeed  "a  sheet  of  paper 
white,  on  which  each  one  of  us  can  write  a  word  or  two, 
and  then  comes — Night " — I  say,  if  this  be  a  just  simile 
of  life,  then,  to  pursue  the  parable,  we  may  add  that  this 
old  lady  has  discovered  her  sheet  of  paper  is  getting  so 
small  that  she  must  economize  space  and  write  close  the 
remaining  words. 

Lady,  indeed,  one  must  call  her,  for  if  you  overhear 
what  she  says  to  her  equals  it  is  all  besprinkled  with 
polite  phrases  :  "But,  Sir" — or  "No,  Madam,"  the  whole 
being  normal  tribal  usage,  not  mere  make-believe.  You 
might,  in  fact,  be  reading  Bos  well's  Johnson,  the  re- 
spectful "  Sirs "  so  marvellously  many.  To  seek  to 
establish  a  ratio  of  success  is,  of  course,  invidious,  but 
personally  I  prefer  the  soft-voiced  pleading  of  these 
old  ladies  to  the  loud  young  man  who  winds  up  with 
his  seven  last  woes.  For  Grandmother  is  really  a 
weeping  sower,  and  with  tears  in  her  eyes  and  Christ 
in  her  heart,  she  warns  of  impending  doom.  Then  a 
sort  of  sob  steals  into  her  story,  the  sincerity  of  that 
sob  making  the  warning  all  the  more  solemn.  In  her 
own  sad  experience,  I  know  for  a  fact  that  one  of  these 
old  dears  has  discovered  that  tears  are  a  true  telescope 
lens  through  which  she  can  pierce  far  into  the  heavens 
above,  so  no  wonder  she  believes  in  being  a  weeping 
sower,  for  tears  cannot   blind  if  they  be  telescopes. 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


357 


Contrast  many  a  young  negro  preacher  who  can  cover 
such  an   amazing   territory  of  Christian  truth   in  his 
sermon,  forgetful  of  the  fact  that  to  preach  the  ever-  * 
lasting  Gospel  does  not  mean  to  preach  everlastingly. 
*  *  # 

The  ant-bear  (Mpendwa)  very  annoyingly  burrows 
his  holes  right  in  the  path,  and  the  unwary  traveller 
could  with  great  ease  break  his  leg  in  any  one  of  them. 
So  sly  are  these  curious  sloths,  that  many  a  native  on 
the  wrong  side  of  forty  has  lived  his  life  without  seeing 
one.  My  man,  a  Lambaite,  killed  four  of  these  scarce 
monsters  in  a  most  cold-blooded,  efficient  manner.  With 
all  their  wit  centred  in  their  two-inch-long  claws,  they 
tunnel  far  underground,  and  the  trick  is  to  out- 
manoeuvre him  in  his  network  of  subterranean  subtlety. 
Hibernating  as  they  do  for  half  the  year,  the  solemn 
way  they  go  to  bed  for  their  sloth-sleep  has  won  for 
them  the  negro  phrase,  *'  drunk  with  sleep."  Like  five 
long  red  sausages,  each  six  feet  in  length,  there  they 
were,  packed  in,  snout  first,  thick  tail  pointing  outwards. 
With  a  warrior  light  in  his  eye,  my  man  wriggled  into 
the  tunnel  with  his  huge  spear  and  killed  No.  1  in  a 
long  choking  moan.  Then  followed  the  solemn  "  sealing 
of  the  tube,"  the  process  being  repeated  with  the  certainty 
of  a  professional  until  four  out  of  the  five  all  died  by 
his  long  lance.  An  adequate  English  analogy  would  be 
to  imagine  the  London  Tube  Railway  throwing  up 
quantities  of  fresh  meat  out  of  the  earth  !  No.  5,  how- 
ever, had  sapped  a  new  tunnel  of  escape,  escape  in  this 


358 


THINKING  BLACK 


case  being  not  by  exit,  but  a  deeper  burrow,  defying  man 
to  breathe  therein. 

Given  good  paint  and  a  better  painter,  here  you  have 
a  mountain  incident  that  would  hang  as  best  Academy 
picture  of  the  year.  Last  night  a  native  after  sundown 
was  holding  his  breath  as  he  picked  his  way  down  the 
face  of  this  precipice,  eye  and  ear  pledged  to  perpetual 
vigilance  in  the  really  awful  venture.  So  engrossed  was 
the  benighted  traveller  in  testing  every  fearful  foothold 
that  he  was  wholly  unconscious  of  a  hungry  old  lion 
stealthily  stalking  him  from  behind.  Intrepidly  venture- 
some, this  man-eater  had  already  gained  on  his  pro- 
spective prey  by  taking  two  chasms  at  two  noiseless 
bounds.  Is  there  going  to  be  no  slip  between  that  cup 
of  a  ravine  and  this  lip  of  a  precipice  ?  The  astounding 
answer  is  that  here  is  a  lion  planning  murder  who 
commits  suicide.  Madly  springing  at  his  man  over 
the  chasm,  but  not  reckoning  on  the  narrow  ledge  of 
treacherous  schist  for  a  foothold,  down  he  dashes  over 
the  last  jutting  crag  of  time  into  the  gulf  of  eternity, 
a  dark  yawning  abyss,  hundreds  of  feet  deep.  The  next 
day,  far,  far  below,  he  was  raked  out  by  the  people  of 
the  plain,  broken  in  every  bone. 

Eastward  ho  !  Left  the  toy-town  in  the  rocks  and 
were  soon  buried  in  thick  woods,  w^hich  only  once  broke 
on  a  "  parkland  "  centred  by  a  palm,  the  useful  Hyphame. 
At  8.30,  to  the  surprise  of  everybody,  we  stood  on  the 
Eastern  edge  of  Kundelungu  Range  and  looked  down  on 
the  beautiful  Luapula  Valley  stretching  far  to  the  East, 


BORING  OUT  EAST  359 

rolling  away  in  rich  slopes  and  watered  by  a  thousand 
streams — "  a  delightsome  land."    First  glimpses,  though, 
are  fictitious,  and  the  boys  who  are  ahead  cheer  us  on. 
Swinging  round  a  shoulder  of  the  hill,  we  emerge  from  its 
terminal  clump  of  trees,  and,  perched  out  on  a  last  ledge 
of  rock,  away  on  the  N.E.  we  spy  our  first  and  most 
wonderful  view  of  Lake  Mweru — a  mighty  sheet  upon 
which  the  morning  sun,  painted  as  never  Turner  painted 
it,  is  shining  like  a  mass  of  liquid  gold.    But  who  could 
dare  to  describe  that  colour  ? — "  not  colour,  Mr.  Ruskin, 
but  conflagration."    Even  if  it  were  possible,  it  would  be 
profanation.    With  no  East  shore  visible,  and  not  having 
seen  a  sister-sheet  of  water  like  this  Mweru  since  our  last 
sight  of  the  Atlantic,  the  sheer  extravaganza  of  the  sight 
makes  one  shout  for  joy.    Born  as  I  was  by  the  seashore, 
now  it  is  the  curtain  of  memory  rises,  and  this  wide 
waste  of  waters  welcoming  us  as  we  emerge  from  the  long 
choking  grass  makes  us  feel  as  though  we  had  escaped 
from  a  tropical  trap.    Away  to  the  South,  banks  of 
morning  mist  are  rolling  up  from  the  lagoons  of  the 
Luapula,  and  only  very  faintly  can  we  guess  Kasembe's 
capital,  .sleeping  prosperously  in  the  sun,  on  the  British 
side.    British,  indeed,  that  soil,  for  the  other  day  Rhodes 
painted  all  those  trans-Luapula  lands  red  on  the  map,  a 
clannish  colour  the  red  sun  repeats  every  morning  it  rolls 
up  like  a  ball  of  fire.    Here  comes  a  dissolving  scene 
which  memory  makes  its  own  for  ever,  every  moment  a 
memento.    For  slowly,  but  surely,  time  that  tempereth 
all  things  takes  the  flare  out  of  this  red  flambeau,  twenty 


360  THINKING  BLACK 

minutes  representing  as  many  dissolving  shades  in  the 
softening  scheme  of  colour  :  step  by  step,  shade  by  shade, 
working  up  from  monochrome  through  tint  after  tint, 
through  rose  into  pale  lemon,  through  sea-green  into  the 
ultimate  azure.    Tell  me,  please,  is  plain  Peter  Bell  my 
negro  neighbour  taking  it  all  in  as  he  looks  moodily  at 
vacancy  ?    Apparently,  I  am  observing  while  he  is  only 
seeing,  for  a  beam  of  light  in  the  eye  is  not  charged  with 
thought,  is  it  ?    Or  can  it  be  that  he,  a  landsman,  is 
thinking  of  this  Lake  as  the  murderer  of  fishermen  in 
their  coggly  dug-outs,  the  red  sunrise  symbolic  of  the 
red  blood  of  its  victims  ?    To  him  this  painted  poetry  is 
the  plainest  of  plain  prose,  for  in  cruelty  this  Lake  is  feline. 
It  licks  your  feet  and  purrs  very  pleasantly,  but  it  will 
crack  your  bones  for  all  that — then  wipe  its  foaming  lips 
as  if  naught  had  happened.    But  the  grandest  bit  of 
Geography  in  the  whole  landscape  is  the  glorious  West 
side,  away  up  North  towards  Luanza,  where  the  sharp 
headlands  have  given  the  West  marshes  the  slip.  Rising 
sheer  from  the  Lake,  these  bluflfs  are  seen  buttressing  the 
whole  North- Western  Coast,  dozens  of  little  streams  vying 
with  each  other  how  to  leap  over  the  cliff  gracefully  with 
waterfalls  like  a  white  mare's  tail.    The  last  of  these  is  a 
gaunt  spike  of  headland  called  Chipuma,  alongside  which 
the  river  Luanza  flows  into  Mweru — our  home  in  the  far 
future. 

But  in  Africa  you  too,  like  plain  Peter  Bell,  must  get 
all  your  poetry  out  of  the  prose  of  life.  So  off  we  go 
jolting  down  the  hillside,  heading  for  the  first  town  in 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


361 


the  valley  whose  lights  we  watched  last  night  winking 
out  one  by  one.  But  we  draw  blank,  for  all  have  taken 
to  the  grass  on  our  approach,  fearing  the  advent  of  the 
Arabs,  who  are  raiding  the  whole  valley.  Shimba  is  the 
Arab  leader's  name  =  Lion.  The  eerie  stillness  reigning 
in  the  abandoned  town  bodes  no  good  for  the  morrow,  so 
we  dart  on  into  the  valley,  heading  for  Chilolo  Ntambo's. 
Quite  a  political  portent  in  his  way,  this  plucky  man  has 
strongly  entrenched  himself  in  the  plains,  resolved  to 
break  or  be  broken.  Meanwhile,  and  in  curious  contrast, 
the  scattered  aboriginal  chiefs  are  at  their  old  game  of 
hateful  and  baneful  plotting  ;  hysterically  crying  out  one 
moment,  "  Come  and  kill  Shimba ! "  and  the  next  rush- 
ing up  among  the  rocks  for  refuge.  Torn  into  tribal 
tatters  as  they  are,  the  Arabs  come  on  the  scene  and,  of 
course,  instead  of  killing  the  flames  of  negro  faction,  they 
kindle  them.  Then  it  is  the  old  cry  rings  through  the 
glens,  the  bitter  wail  of  Kachel  weeping  for  her  children. 

As  fighting  is  again  imminent,  and  Shimba  is  gathering 
for  another  attempt,  I  send  on  messengers  to  carry  the 
olive  branch,  their  business  being  to  clinch  the  cardinal 
postulate  that  I  am  "  a  thing  of  naught "  ( Wagere). 
Ergo,  being  a  mere  pilgrim  travelling  through,  they  must 
not  expect  me  to  help  them  in  this  mundane  matter  of 
aiming  a  gun-barrel  in  their  trumpery  squabble.  When 
I  told  this  candid  cut-throat  that  it  was  the  honourable 
business  of  the  Church  militant  to  suffer  blows  rather 
than  strike  them,  he  seemed  almost  inclined  to  adroitly 
interpose  a  big  black  fist  between  his  face  and  mine  by 


362 


THINKING  BLACK 


way  of  testing  the  temper  of  my  peace  platitude.  Press- 
ing on,  an  armed  escort  emerges  from  the  grass  with  a 
roar,  but  these  brimstone  blacks  acclaim  us  as  brother  cut- 
throats and  seem  quite  sure  we  will  kill  three  negroes  for 
their  one.    Once,  twice,  and  yet  thrice  I  break  in  on  them 
with  a  disclaimer — no,  they  don't  want  my  olive  branch, 
for  when  I'm  for  peace,  like  King  David,  then  they  are  for 
war.    Tell  them  to  mortify  the  flesh  and  they  will  indeed 
agree  to  do  so,  but  it  is  their  enemy's  flesh  they  mean 
to  mortify  with  a  spear-thrust.    Thus  encircled  by  a  ring 
of  rascals,  we  trudge  on,  only  to  encounter  escort  No.  2  on 
the  edge  of  their  stockade  den,  the  horrible  huzzahs 
suggesting  that  this  out-at-elbows  Missionary  is  reckoned 
a  staunch  supporter  of  their  war.    Remember,  all  this  is 
a  mere  ovation  to  my  white  skin,  not  white  character, 
and  it  is  not  at  all  flattering  to  recall  the  fact  that  yonder 
red-haired  hobbledehoy  of  an  Englishman,  smoking  his 
short  pipe  at  the  corner  of  Seven  Dials,  would  get  as 
royal  a  welcome.    Besides,  ovation  notwithstanding,  you 
need  not  go  away  and  fancy  everybody  in  the  town  is 
thinking  of  you  :  nay,  verily,  he  is  like  you,  he  is  think- 
ing of  himself.    Not  even  a  very  tiny  idea  had  they  in 
the  back  of  their  heads  that  Christ  was  versus  Barabbas, 

But  in  Africa  I  have  long  ago  learned  that  you  must 
put  up  with  a  great  deal  if  you  would  put  down  a  great 
deal,  and  here  is  no  exception.  Greeting  the  Chief,  this 
kindly  man  has  the  kindly  idea  that  he  should  decorously 
shake  hands  with  me  a  la  JEuropt^en,  so  for  the  first 
time  in  his  life  he  experiments  on  a  hand-shake.  Then 


BORING  OUT  EAST  363 

after  laboriously  moving  my  arm  up  and  down  for  some 
minutes  like  a  stiflf  pump-handle  he  lets  it  go,  only  to  be 
seconded  by  his  wife,  a  small  and  very  daintily  finished 
little  lady.    This  dame,  I  suppose,  thought  she  had  made 
quite  a  toilet.    Ordinarily  dressed  in  a  simple  and  strong 
homespun,    to-day   she   thinks    herself  irreproachably 
gowned  in  an  old  ragged  and  coloured  blanket,  marred 
with  as  many  patches  as  blotches.    Why  is  it  that,  right 
down  from  the  days  of  Mother  Eve,  as  soon  as  a  woman 
arrives  at  self-consciousness  her  first  thought  is  of  a  new 
dress  ?    In  the  local  homespun  she  would  have  been 
handsome,  but  now  she  is  horrid.    A  sprinkling  of  loud 
yellow  patches  on  a  red  ground  is   her  ideal.  They 
despise  even  fine  lace,  think  it  a  rag,  and  call  it  "a  lot 
of  holes  tied  together."    Alas  !  evil  communications  do 
indeed  corrupt  good  manners,  for  in  half  a  tick  this  new 
stiff  pump-handle  salute  with  high  and  low  is  de  rigueur. 
But  Chilolo  is  a  real  and  reliable  sort  of  a  man  and  would 
make  a  good  impression  if  sketched  when  he  is  speaking 
in  his  firm  and  yet  quite  unostentatious  way.    If  dis- 
simulation is  the  mask  of  the  soul,  then  sincerity  is  its 
face,  and  I  like  the  transparency  of  this  old  hero.  Smoking 
a  meditative  pipe,  he  told  the  tale  of  these  Arabs'  entry 
into  the  country  on  the  old  plea  of  honest  trade.    Told  of 
their  picking  a  quarrel  after  a  thousand  hateful  impertin- 
ences.   Told  finally  of  attack  and  repulse  in  quick  suc- 
cession, with  the  promise  of  a  real  big  battle  on  the 
morrow.    Such,  then,  is  "  the  man  behind  the  gun,"  a 
desperate   enemy  but  a  fine  friend.    An  African  this 


364 


THINKING  BLACK 


who  in  many  things  is  far  and  near  belauded  as  a  Chief 
with  a  delicate  and  scrupulous  sense  of  honour,  and 
certainly  Mushidi  showed  his  usual  shrewdness  when  he 
gave  this  man  long  ago  a  kind  of  governorship  [Diyanga) 
of  the  Luapula  Valley. 

"V  But  these  bellicose  blacks  have  hearts  of  adamant 
where  God's  Gospel  is  concerned,  and  only  met  my  appeal 
with  mortified  glances.  Every  man  of  them  said  in  his 
heart — and  a  horrible  saying  it  is — that  God  was  a  fool 
to  leave  His  Son  to  die.  In  Luba  the  very  phrase  "  a 
fool's  death  "is  rendered  "  a  sheep's  death"  (Isa.  liii.  7). 
Chilolo's  son,  a  young  exquisite,  was  as  solemn  as  a 
sermon  when  he  said  that  no  black  man  would  believe  in 
such  a  God.  And  here  was  I,  all  alone  in  that  hot  den, 
with  lacerated  feelings  and  blistered  feet — ah,  how  a 
Missionary  suddenly  shrivels  up  into  himself  with  one 

>  whiff  of  such  loneliness.  But  I  cannot  go  back,  so  I  must 
go  forward — and  what  a  goal,  the  linking  up  with  our  own 
English  race  from  East !  Any  day  something  thrilling 
may  happen,  for  coincidently  with  our  moving  in  from  the 
Western  Atlantic  are  they  not  also  boring  up  here  into 
the  Interior  from  the  Indian  Ocean  ?  The  exact  picture 
of  this  exciting  thing  is  to  be  found  in  thinking  of  us  as 
engaged  in  the  excavation  of  a  tunnel,  and  here  we  have 
at  least  reached  the  delirious  point  where  we  almost 
begin  to  hear  the  pickaxes  of  the  excavators  at  work  in  the 
other  side  of  the  tunnel !  Of  course  the  plan  of  route 
ahead  is  not  even  optional  now.  It  seems  it  has  fallen  to 
my  lot,  and  I  hope  to  my  delight,  as  well  as  my  duty,  to 


BORING  OUT  EAST  365 

strike  Mweru  at  its  South- Western  corner,  and  negotiate 
the  first  trans-Lake  voyage  in  dug-outs. 

But  here  it  is  a  long  line  of  lion  incidents  occur,  the 
curious  persistency  of  the  thing  being  like  the  African's 
proverbial  rain  that  never  comes  but  it  pours.  At  any 
rate,  they  seem  to  be  all  the  fashion,  whether  biped  lions 
or  quadrupeds,  for  here  is  this  putrid  scoundrel  of  an 
Arab  calling  himself  Shimba  =  The  Lion,  and  even  Chilolo 
claims  the  suffix-surname  Ntambo,  which  also  means 
"  Lion."  Certainly  the  roaring  in  name  soon  became  a 
roaring  in  reality.  Forewarned  of  trouble  ahead,  in  the 
phrase  Ntanda  ya  kava,  "  the  forest  is  on  fire,"  we 
began  by  camping  early  and  building  a  strong  skerm,  as 
war-parties  do.  That  night,  however,  we  drew  a  blank, 
the  only  incident  being  a  troop  of  elephants  rushing  past 
at  sundown,  making  a  noise  like  thunder.  Plunging  into 
the  fens  near  by,  they  bathed  for  more  than  an  hour,  and 
with  glee  seemingly.  Nearing  Mbovola's  village,  however, 
we  find  the  villagers  outside,  frantic  with  excitement,  and 
bravely  roasting  a  large  lioness  which  had  daringly  leaped 
the  fifteen-feet-high  stockade  and  killed  a  woman  ;  move 
on  and  into  this  village,  but  just  as  we  enter  at  one  side, 
down  goes  the  portcullis  gate  with  a  smash  at  the  river 
entrance,  breaking  the  leap  of  the  large  male  lion  ac- 
companied by  two  little  ones,  all  seemingly  bent  on 
avenging  the  lioness.  Then,  day  and  night,  the  drums 
din  their  deafening  noise,  all  hope  lost  of  your  sleeping  up 
arrears  of  the  past  wakefid  nights. 

Nor  will  the  villagers  let  us  ofi"  the  next  day,  so  here 


366 


THINKING  BLACK 


we  rest.  This  bereaved  and  famished  lion  having  made 
up  his  masterful  mind  to  avenge  his  consort,  twice 
attempted  to  spring  the  stockade,  but  was  driven  off. 
Thus  our  first  fears  were  justified  of  a  long  lion  trail,  and 
the  links  soon  became  many  in  the  chain  of  prophecy. 
The  appalling  rinderpest  has  killed  ofi"  all  the  antelopes, 
hence  the  famished  lions  are  forced  to  raid  the  hamlets 
and  play  for  higher  stakes. 

Farther  along,  Mbayo,  in  the  same  valley,  very 
pluckily  killed  a  large  male  lion  with  an  elephant-spear. 
Well  primed  with  liquor,  this  tall  native  met  his  man- 
eater  at  the  village  gate.  Just  as  it  sprang  for  him,  he 
fixed  his  spear  as  an  infantry  soldier  does  his  bayonet  on 
the  command  "  Prepare  for  cavalry,"  the  lion  running 
himself  through  the  heart  in  his  spring.  The  famished 
fraternity  came  round  during  the  night,  and  those  royal 
rogues  actually  ate  up  their  dead  comrade,  making  much 
noise  in  the  mastication.  It  is  madness  to  send  our 
little  boys  to  draw  water  or  fetch  firewood  here  without 
an  escort.  But  the  end  is  not  yet.  Farther  along  in  that 
same  valley — to  be  exact,  at  Kapara's — a  great  lion  was 
killed  measuring  thirteen  and  a  half  feet  from  tip  to 
tail.  He,  poor  fellow,  was  a  shaggy  veteran  with  blunted 
teeth,  starving  seemingly,  for  his  ribs  were  looking 
through.  This  lion  must  have  welcomed  death,  as  his 
poor  right  paw  was  a  swollen  festered  mass,  a  large  acacia 
thorn  deeply  embedded  in  the  quick.  Thus  we  bowl 
along  into  the  savannah,  the  rank  grass,  ten  feet  high, 
shutting  out  view  of  everything  save  a  little  blur  of  blue 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


367 


overhead.  After  a  few  hours  of  this  kind  of  work, 
needle-pointed  grass  seeds  showering  down,  the  long  stalks 
rebounding  sharply  on  the  face,  a  kind  of  smothering 
sensation  is  the  result,  and  you  wish  for  just  one  whiff  of 
ocean  ozone.  With  hundreds  of  spear-pointed  seeds 
sticking  out  of  your  shirt  it  is  easy  to  become  a  very 
porcupine  in  temper  as  well  as  appearance !  The 
science  of  walking  through  grass  of  this  description  which 
overhangs  and  hides  the  path  is  very  simple,  what  a  poet 
has  described  as  "  following  some  fine  instinct  in  the  feet," 
Like  a  blind  man  who  cannot  sec  the  trail,  you  throw 
forward  your  feet  in  a  pawing  manner,  pull  your  body 
after  them,  and  feel  along  in  this  fashion.  Boasting  of 
carnivora  as  it  does,  this  savannah  is  a  lively,  dangerous 
place,  and  one  has  to  be  always  high-strung  and  vigilant 
in  the  long  grass.  Even  down  to  the  shore  of  the 
Mulungwishi  River  where  we  embarked,  these  lions 
dogged  our  steps,  and  actually  farewelled  us  with  a  double 
episode.    It  was  on  this  wise. 

In  the  far  distance  grey  Mweru  Lake  was  hoarsely 
threatening  a  storm,  and  the  scudding  clouds  revealed  a 
furtive  moon.  There,  jammed  into  the  thick  aquatic 
grass,  lay  our  canoes  for  the  morrow,  the  beach  so  tangled 
that  we,  for  the  night,  were  shut  into  a  tight  little  skerm 
to  save  our  skins.  At  one  in  the  morning  an  ominous 
scrunching,  and  the  famished  lions  are  eating  our 
canoes.  Eating  our  canoes !  Very  vaguely  and  at 
random  I  aimed  for  the  matted  clump  of  marsh,  but  even 
this  guess  shot  caused  the  noise  to  stop  with  alacrity  far 


368 


THINKING  BLACK 


too  sudden  for  it  to  have  been  a  miss.  Then  came  day- 
break and  the  discovery  of  our  nocturnal  damages  ;  as  for 
the  canoes,  the  breakages  were  merely  in  the  singular  and 
not  in  the  plural,  but  how  singular — only  the  fifth  boat 
crunched  to  pieces !  So,  too,  the  lions ;  one  only  had 
been  wounded,  and  she  caused  a  lot  of  trouble  before  she 
died.  Sliimpauka,  one  of  the  right  sort,  followed  her  up 
but  lost  traces  in  the  tangle,  then  stupidly  let  go  his  best 
charge  at  a  buck,  reloading  with  only  a  poor  pinch  of 
powder  as  he  presumed  he  had  lost  the  lion.  Hardly, 
however,  had  his  gun  spoken  when  he  discovered  his 
stupid  error.  For  there,  sure  enough,  and  only  a  dozen 
paces  farther  ahead,  lay  my  lady,  not  nearly  dead  but 
merely  nursing  her  broken  leg.  If  she  offers  battle  (and 
she  must),  then  she  will  fight  and  fight  to  the  death. 
Then  the  terrible  trouble  began,  for  the  dense  growth  had 
spoiled  matters  and  forced  him  to  see  this  thing  through 
— retreat  impossible.  So  he  drew  a  careful  bead  on  the 
lioness,  the  thought  maddenino;  him  the  while  that  here 
he  was  firing  a  stupid  squib,  sure  only  to  jag  the  exas- 
perated beast  into  mad  recrimination.  And  what  do 
you  think  ?  There  you  see  the  doleful  duel  begin  in 
which,  tit-for-tat,  the  wrath  of  a  man  is  matched  against 
the  wrath  of  a  lioness.  Their  blood  is  up.  On  rushes 
the  beast  and  on  rushes  the  black  !  The  strong,  strapping 
fellow,  in  a  frenzy  of  determination,  and  longing  to  get  it 
over,  hugs  the  huge  lioness  in  a  strangling  grasp,  and  over 
they  go  on  the  ground  in  a  whirl  of  man  and  lion.  The 
lioness  has  dug  her  claws  into  the  mass  of  muscle  on  the 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


369 


man's  back  ;  and  the  man,  smarting  with  pain,  grips  at  the 
lion's  carotids  like  a  vice,  only,  however,  to  get  his  three 
fingers  crunched  off.  But  his  right  hand  is  free,  and  still 
he  clings  with  all  the  tenacity  of  terror  to  that  beast's 
throat — yes,  clings  to  conquer.  A  gasp,  a  dying  gurgle, 
and  the  lioness  owns  up  to  the  lordship  of  man — choked 
stone  dead.  To  this  day,  all  you  can  get  out  of  the 
maimed  hunter  is  a  hissing  intake  of  the  breath,  and  a 
sharp  clenching  of  his  teeth,  with  the  staccato  whine  : 
"  Oh  !  if  I  only  had  had  one  tiny  point  of  steel  to  jag  her 
with ;  yes,  even  a  nail  or  a  needle  to  claw  her  when  she 
was  clawing  me." 

But  all  this  is  exceptional,  you  say.  Incredible  as  it 
may  seem,  this  getting  into  grips  with  Felis  leo  is  not  at 
all  uncommon.  Here  is  my  man,  Kasansu,  who  has  had 
almost  the  identical  experience,  only  in  his  case  no  shot 
is  fired,  the  lion  frankly  and  fairly  under-muscled.  This 
same  long  grass  did  it  all,  for  although  doubly  armed  with 
gun  and  spear,  the  lion  and  the  man  were  in  grips  before 
the  latter  (startled,  indeterminate)  even  remembered  that 
he  was  armed — disarmed  rather,  for  in  panic  both  spear 
and  gun  were  thrown  to  the  winds.  The  beast,  of  course, 
was  too  terribly  fresh  to  succumb  to  mere  throttling,  so, 
when  they  rolled  over,  Kasansu,  by  a  clever  wriggle, 
got  on  to  its  back,  and  gripping  the  nape  of  the  lion's 
neck,  willy,  nilly,  pinned  his  hairy  head  on  the  ground. 
Believe  it,  there  was  much  champing  of  the  bit  on  the 
lion's  part  at  this  curious  compulsion  to  eat  humble  pie, 
but  the  man's  roaring  for  succour  had  brought  on  the 


370 


THINKING  BLACK 


scene  a  young  fellow  whose  only  weapon  was  a  hoe-handle 
— wood,  only  wood,  when  steel  was  the  clamant  need. 
Nevertheless,  the  youngster,  after  much  entreaty,  was 
persuaded  to  come  on  with  his  stick,  the  lad's  haunting 
terror  being  that  Kasansu  out  of  sheer  exhaustion  would 
let  go  his  grip  of  this  licking-the-dust  lion.  But  it  all 
ended  in  victory.  Crack !  crack  !  crack  !  and  the  lion's 
skull  was  soon  broken  by  this  simple  hoe-handle.  In 
later  days  a  relative  of  this  lion  in  the  same  district — 
"  Charlie,"  they  called  him — died  only  after  running  up 
a  big  butcher's  bill  of  nearly  sixty  dead  natives.  To  be 
exact,  fifty- seven. 

(Later.) 

Blood  still  dogs  us,  and  here  comes  another  death,  a 
weird  one.  Picture  my  boy  killed  by  such  an  incredibly 
unlikely  animal  as  the  ratel,  a  sort  of  skunk  that  feeds  on 
honey.  I  can  well  conceive  how  the  whole  thing  may 
strike  the  reader  of  this  chronicle  as  absurd.  It  happened 
at  Mungedi's,  and  the  curious  tale  runs  that  this  three-feet- 
long  badger  gets  systematically  drunk  from  an  angry 
alcohol  he  distils  from  the  beehives.  Living  as  he  does  so 
wholly  on  honey,  the  ratel  has  learned  to  sample  it  in  all 
stages  of  fermentation,  and  finally  has  struck  the  idea  of 
making  his  own  distillery  !  This  he  does  by  digging  a 
pot-like  hole  with  his  three  middle  claws  on  the  wet  bank 
of  a  river.  Now  he  rams  home  the  honey  with  a  careful 
admixture  of  water,  and  ofi"  he  goes  to  await  the  issue  of 
the  loyal  law  of  fermentation.  In  two  days  or  so,  back 
he  comes  to  find  his  alcohol  foaming  up  out  of  the  hole, 


BORING  OUT  EAST 


371 


and  in  a  few  minutes  Mr,  Badger  is  rolling  drunk.  The 
liquor  swimming  through  his  veins  like  a  glorious  fire 
makes  him  mad  for  murder.  In  height  not  much  more 
than  a  foot,  anterior  claws  say  two  inches,  here  is  my  boy 
killed  by  a  drunk  skunk.  The  skin  is  so  tantalizingly 
loose  that  if  you  grip  it,  he  can  actually  turn  in  it  and 
grip  you.  Another  instance  of  Africa  being  a  topsy-turvy 
land,  an  animal  being  doubly  a  distiller  and  a  drunkard. 

*  *  # 

Beneath  all  this  opulence  of  colour  there  lurks  the 
sinister  thought  that  Palpalis  is  ambushed  in  every  green 
clump,  transforming  it  into  a  weeping  willow.  For  this 
vile  fly  means  sleeping  sickness,  and  sleeping  sickness 
means  a  wipe-out.  Now  meandering  through  mossy 
glades,  now  thundering  down  the  gorge,  these  Congo 
tributaries  really  ring  hollow  at  heart.  Only  the  birds  and 
beasts  have  a  good  time  down  here.  There,  serene  in  it 
all,  the  black  darter  sits  sentinel  on  a  snag  jutting  out  of 
the  water,  and  sunning  his  dark  shining-green  wings  out- 
stretched. Oblivious  of  the  masked  murder  all  around, 
clouds  of  snow-white  egrets  with  bright  yellow  bills  in 
the  still  reaches  of  the  river  fly  lazily  up  and  down 
to  their  favourite  feeding  haunts.  On,  on  you  glide 
down  the  gorge  to  the  steady  dip  of  your  paddles, 
the  river  brawling  over  the  rocks  and  preaching  as  we 
pass.  True  for  you.  Father  Congo !  In  Africa  we  do 
find  that  a  Christian  is  not  a  canal  cut  out  by  a  foot-rule  ; 
not  a  canal,  but  a  river.  And  a  river  has  its  deeps  and 
a3 


372 


THINKING  BLACK 


shallows ;  has  its  floods  and  shrinkages ;  is,  in  fact,  God's 
own  parable  of  a  missionary.  It  only  passes  on  what  it 
gets.  It  only  babbles  like  a  baby  when  it  is  shallow. 
And  it  ever  darts  strongly  and  surely  for  the  sea  when 
too  full  for  sound  and  foam. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
Kavanga :  the  Gates  of  the  Morning 


"There's  a  legion  that  never  was  listed, 
That  carries  no  colours  nor  crest, 
But  split  in  a  thousand  detachments 
Is  breaking  the  road  for  the  rest" 

♦  *  « 

"I  propose  one  more  society  in  the  Church— an 
S.S.S.S. — or  Society  for  the  Suppression  of  Super- 
fluous Societies."  E.  P.  Marvin. 

♦  ♦  * 

"Good  it  is  we  have  no  Society  guaranteeing  a 
stated  salary.  For  cut  off  as  we  are  from  our 
nearest  bank  by  one  thousand  miles,  the  said 
Society  would  be  politely  and  cleverly  baffled  how 
to  send  our  quarterly  remittance. 

From  Author's  Letter. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


Kavanga :  the  Gates  of  the  Morning 

N  which  the  lost-in-a-forest  traveller 
learns  that  the  Lord  of  Eternity  is 
the  Lord  of  One  Hour. 

BUT  the  amalgamated  worries  of  Africa  seem  all  shut 
iuto  the  three  days  we  are  lost  in  the  savannah, 
groping  and  guessing  our  way.  Cutting  back  from 
the  Luapula,  we  adopt  the  very  risky  but  necessary  plan 
of  striking  pathless  across  country.  Through  forest-land 
heading  all  the  while  for  a  certain  far-off  faint  blue  point 
on  the  tableland.  "The  Plantations  of  God"  is  the 
admonishing  native  forest  name  for  what  to  me  was  a 
trap.  Here  it  is  you  put  your  foot  where  never  even 
black  man  preceded  you,  and  here  too  you  learn  the 
lesson  of  all  the  twists  in  the  African  trail.  It  is  the  old 
line-of-least-resistance  idea,  for  day  after  day  you  must 
accommodate  yourself  to  the  new  and  changing  aspect  of 
country  lying  across  your  track.  A  shag  leads  off  by 
blocking  the  way,  and  the  shorter  the  shag  the  more 
dangerous  it  is,  because  hidden  in  the  grass.  Your  boot 
saves  you,  a  white  man,  but  even  then  you  would  rather 


376  THINKING  BLACK 


save  the  boot,  for  you  only  escape  a  cut  at  the  expense  of 
cutting  your  own  precious  foot-wear.  Now  it  is  that  this 
leather  covering  appears  to  the  barefoot  native  both  a 
marvel  and  a  portent,  for  instead  of  thinking  that  the 
boot  merely  covers  the  foot  that  wears  it,  his  idea  is  that 
those  few  inches  of  shoe  carpet  the  whole  forest  with 
leather.  A  good  lesson  this,  that  even  in  the  smallest 
boons  of  life  there  is  nothing  like  the  widest  point  of 
view,  mere  inches  multiplied  to  miles.  Literally  only  so 
many  inches,  but  actually  they  cause  the  whole  earth 
you  walk  on  to  be  covered  with  leather,  so  it  all  depends 
on  how  you  look  on  a  little  thing.  This  tale  of  jags, 
however,  is  only  one  per  cent  of  the  story,  for  the  re- 
maining ninety-nine  of  your  caravan  boasts,  not  boots, 
but  that  delicate  pneumatic  tyre — a  bare  black  foot. 
Hence  all  these  doublings  and  twistings  of  the  negro 
trail,  for  your  naked  companion  must  go  gingerly  along 
this  never-trodden  ground,  every  wobble  being  out  of 
deep  reverence  to  some  hidden  shag  or  jag  in  the  dense 
growth.  For  in  order  to  avoid  a  pneumatic  puncture, 
he  must  feel  his  way  along,  as  against  the  white  man 
with  his  leather  "  clogs  "  (sic)  who  can  cut  across  country 
crunching  down  all  oppositions.  Then  after  the  shag 
comes  the  stupid  young  ant-hill  demanding  another 
wriggle  from  the  traveller,  but  this  is  minor  compared 
with  the  long  detour  round  a  fallen  tree  :  is  it  not  easier 
to  dodge  than  dislodge  it  ?  This  means  a  twist  twenty 
feet  round  the  end,  and  long  years  after  this  tree  has 
been  burned  out  of  existence  the  pawky  path  still  per- 


KAVANGA :  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  377 

petuates  that  very  tree's  downfall  in  the  same  old  bend. 
Often,  too,  as  a  happy  accident  of  environment,  wide, 
roomy  elephant-ways  open  up  before  you  seductively,  so 
off  at  a  tempting  tangent  you  go,  although  conscious  of 
the  cowardice  of  the  thing.  For  how  could  a  roaming 
elephant  know  your  path  ?  Then  the  blue  landmark  on 
the  plateau  looms  out  warningly  from  an  opposite  point 
in  the  skyline,  compelling  you  to  play  the  man  and 
plunge  again  into  the  nasty  scrub.  Finally,  all  this  high- 
stepping  is  so  fagging  that  we  lie  down  under  a  tree  and 
rest  like  the  Seven  of  Ephesus  :  a  night  in  which  you 
dream  of  being  lost,  for  ever  lost  in  some  mad  maze — of 
wandering,  for  ever  wandering  in  a  wilderness  of  woe. 

No  wonder  on  the  morning  of  the  20th  of  June,  the 
awakening  is  almost  a  glad  thing,  lost  though  we  are  in 
pathless  bush.  At  least  the  erstwhile  dreamer  can  con- 
sole himself  with  the  faded  adage  about  dreams  going  by 
contraries,  and  you  spring  from  your  couch  on  the  ground, 
proud,  at  least,  you  have  shaken  off  that  feeling  of  utter 
lack  of  volition  ever  haunting  a  dreamer.  But  a  tabloid 
for  your  soul  is  as  necessary  as  an  anti-fever  tabloid  for 
your  body,  because  after  a  day  of  jagging  thorns  we  had 
a  night  of  jagging  mosquitoes.  (To  get  "  keyed  up  "  for 
the  day  is  our  bush  phrase  for  the  true  tonic  effect  of  a 
tabloid  of  quinine.)  These  blood-suckers  make  you  rise, 
tingling  with  fever,  l)ut  here  comes  the  tabloid  for  your 
soul  :  the  Book  of  Hosea  opens  at  the  sunrise  words,  "  His 
goings  forth  are  prepared  as  the  morning."  No  doubt, 
"  lost"  is  the  true  tale  of  our  folly,  nevertheless  there  you 


378 


THINKING  BLACK 


have  the  honest  "  Bible  "  of  the  route,  a  prepared  path  for 
a  prepared  morning.    The  curative  property  of  that  simple 
sweet  line  was  wonderful.    So  away  we  start  once  more, 
and  right  off  get  soaking  wet  in  the  thick  dew — not  the 
modest  dew  of  an  English  meadow  sward,  but  dew  distilled 
ten  feet  from  the  ground  on  spear  grass  and  showering 
down  on  you  like  a  spray-bath.    One  native  taught  me  a 
lesson  in  this  thick  dew  as  to  "counting  my  blessings" 
even  in  times  of  trial.    "  God  is  good,"  said  he,  "  for  the 
thickest  dew  in  Africa  falls  in  hardest  drought,"  a  reminder 
that  God  in  all  lands  "  tempers  the  wind  to  the  shorn 
lamb."    But,  at  least,  in  this  drenching  dew  I  have  a  coat 
on  my  back,  whereas  all  my  poor  fellows  are  shivering 
nude,  so  they  deserve  the  palm.    Indeed,  as  you  tramp 
along,  here  is  a  point  steadily  and  surely  gaining  ground 
in  your  brain,  to  wit,  that  this  man  Friday  of  yours  is  a 
most  companionable  comrade  and  much  more  real  as  a  man 
than  his  wordy  preacher.    On  the  march,  for  instance,  his 
thirst  is  the  real  thing,  and  not  the  ill-tempered  craving 
of  an  Englishman  ;  so,  too,  with  hunger,  his  is  the  hard- 
gnawing  sort,  the  deep  hunger  of  faintness  he  gladly 
satiates  with  the  sundown  meal  of  coarse  mush.  Ah, 
"  ye  have  heard  of  the  patience  of  Job,"  but  know  also 
that  here  are  men  of  grit  and  tenacity  of  purpose.  Cold 
numbs,  hunger  gnaws,  and  they,  down  at  the  very  bottom 
of  life's  hill,  give  never  a  twitch  or  twinge  by  way  of 
grumble.    In  comparison  we,  as  a  grumbling,  greedy  race 
of  Europeans,  are  all  self,  self,  self,  from  the  soles  of  our 
feet  to  the  top  of  our  crown. 


KAVANGA :  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  379 

Nearing  noon  the  boys  fire  a  broadside  of  their  match- 
locks into  a  dense  cavalcade  of  elephants,  a  mere  pinprick 
in  the  armour-plating  :  £10,000  of  ivory  on  the  move — 
what  a  sight !    Each  tusker  with  five  or  more  wives 
according  to  the  length  of  ivory.    The  tusks,  too,  of 
varied  sorts  and  colours,  some  not  at  all  normal,  and  one 
great  bull  with  only  one  tooth.    Another  has  a  freak  tusk, 
and  while  the  normal  one  gleams  gracefully  up  in  posi- 
tion, its  twin  tusk  twists  down  in  the  opposite  direction, 
the  great  beast  looking  a  horror.    But  remember,  animals 
though  they  are,  this  is  not  a  mob  but  an  army,  and  one 
great  bull  seems  to  lord  it  over  the  whole  battalion.  In 
response  to  a  most  aristocratic  wave  of  his  trunk,  like  a 
Field  Marshal's  baton,  away  they  rush  straight  ahead, 
clearing  for  us,  not  a  path  but  a  royal  avenue.  The 
coincidence  of  our  far-ofi"  landmark,  the  steel-blue  wall 
of  Kundelungu,  coming  for  once  into  dead  line  with  the 
track  of  this  army  corps  of  elephants,  is  surely  eloquent 
of  the  goings  forth  of  our  God  being  prepared  as  the 
morning.    Here  at  last  is  your  prepared  path — and  made 
by  elephants,  too. 

But  there  is  more  to  follow.  Not  for  nothing  are 
these  woods  christened  by  the  negroes  "  the  Lord's 
Larder."  "  Plantations  of  God "  is  their  second  name 
for  the  same  idea,  and  as  the  native  would  not  dare  to 
dream  of  driving  God  out  of  His  own  garden,  why  should 
I  ?  "  Every  beast  of  the  forest  is  Mine,"  said  The  Same, 
Who  proves  it  by  sending  this  densely  packed  herd 
galloping  true  for  objective.    (Why  recognise  God  in 


380 


THINKING  BLACK 


great  things  and  exclude  Him  in  small  ?    Why  forget 
that  the  Lord  of  Eternity  is  likewise  Lord  of  an  Hour  ? 
Was  not  the  microscope  discovered  at  the  same  time 
as  the  telescope  ?)  But — I  repeat  it — there  is  more  to 
follow.    Let  those  who  deny  the  efficiency  and  sufficiency 
of  Faith  for  desert  diet  just  wait  one  moment  and  watch 
how  these  very  elephants  feed  us.    A  mere  way  in  the 
wilderness  is  as  nothing  to  a  table  in  the  wilderness,  and 
spread  out  like  lunch  at  a  picnic,  "God's  elephants" — 
the  negro  phrase  this — doing  it  all.    Picture  this  big 
blundering  Jumbo  made  of  God  unto  us  not  merely  our 
advance-guard  to  cleave  an  onward  path,  but  an  elephant 
it  is  that  providentially  becomes  our  kitchen  gardener  in 
the  wilds.    Remember,  or  you  have  missed  the  point, 
the  last  and  nearest  patch  of  cultivation  we  have  left  far 
away  East  along  the  Luapula,  yet  here,  hidden  in  the 
desert — can  I  believe  even  one  of  my  five  senses  ? — 
like  a  vision  from  heaven  we  emerge  on  a  glorious  surprise 
of  green  pumpkins  that  eye  of  man  never  saw — an  "  ele- 
phant garden,"  they  call  this  green  Goshen.    For  one 
measureless  moment  I  could  not   believe   my  eyes — 
elephants,  the  notorious  robbers  of  green  crops,  now 
paying  back  the  human-kind  in  their  own  stolen  vege- 
tables.   Yet  how  easy  and  elementary  the  explanation. 
Hundreds  of  miles  away,  along  the   green   banks  of 
Luapula,  a  band  of  these  rogues  had  raided  the  squash 
gardens  in  the  moonlight ;  then,  having  cleared  out  the 
field,  off  they  rush  for  the  forest,  far,  far  from  the 
dwellings   of   man.     But  however  excellent  Jumbo's 


K  A  VANG  A:  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  381 

digestion,  these  obstinate  pumpkin  seeds  would — well, 
would  not  digest,  hence  these  glorious  gardens  all  from 
stolen  fruit.    Natural  law  in  the  spiritual  world,  verily. 

At  night  in  the  woods  we  built  a  large  fire,  a  mighty 
roarer  five  feet  high,  fed  with  logs  eight  feet  long.  The 
great  blaze  flares  through  the  night,  and  at  daybreak  we 
slink  out,  in  the  raw  morning  air,  to  rub  our  fingers  at 
this  all-night  (and  all-right)  blaze.  But  we  soon  find 
that  ihese  parts  are  alive  with  tsetse,  so  the  only  way 
to  avoid  their  tormenting  sting  is  to  go  off  in  the  moon- 
light, travelling  six  hours — not  per  day,  but  per  night. 
High  in  the  west  hangs  the  monster  moon  as  white  as  a 
new  half-crown.  But  our  path,  remember,  is  fringed 
with  an  endless  grove  of  trees,  and  the  moon  weirdly 
throws  their  sharp  black  shadows  on  the  ground. 
Peeping  out  from  these  ghostly  traceries  of  trees,  we 
guess  here  and  there  the  tiny  ribbon  of  trail  hardly 
hinting  its  presence,  and  this  elusive  little  path  is  our 
precious  all.  Only  eighteen  inches  wide  though  it  be, 
it  is  a  sure  guarantee  of  real  standing  ground,  every- 
where else  a  mass  of  shags  and  jags.  Newcomers  laugh 
at  it,  call  it  "  the  corkscrew,"  "  crooky-crooky,"  and 
other  naughty  names ;  but  in  later  years  the  man  who 
ought  to  know  is  he  who  "  bikes  "  it.  What,  a  "  bike  " 
in  such  a  tangle  ?  Yes,  why  not  ?  Hypercritical  as  he 
is  forced  to  be,  he  is  pledged  to  praise  it  with  a  reason  ! 
For,  nota  bene,  the  negro  and  the  cyclist  are  bound  in 
a  common  bond  of  horror  lest  they  puncture  their 
double  Dunlop  tyres,  the  negro's  bare  toes  being  as 


382 


THINKING  BLACK 


perfect  a  pneumatic  tube  as  the  cyclist's.     So,  when 
that  bare-footed  black  tiptoes  it  through   the  bush, 
dodging  every  suspicion  of  a  jag,  how  unerringly  can 
a  bike  follow  where  his  tender  toes  have  trod !  Thus 
the  very  serpentine  shape  of  that  path  is  its  choicest 
character,   for   every   twist   and   turn   indicates  that 
Mr.  Negro  has  dodged  a  shag  or  thorn,  and  how  could 
a  white  man  afford  time  to  turn  back  every  blade  of 
grass  to  discover  hidden  holes  and  obstacles  ?    A  parable 
all  this  of  our  African  life — the  black  man  leads,  and  we 
follow.     The  best  place  to  prove  all  this  is  out  "West, 
a  mere  mile  out  from  any  European's  "  station,"  for  he, 
good  man,  generally  scratches  a  wide  road  out  from  his 
gate.    And  long  before  a  break  in  the  trees  shows  just 
the  peep  of  his  gable,  this  pioneer  road  tells  of  a  white 
man  ahead.    But  does  your  negro  use  even  this  new- 
fangled clearing  with  its  almost  painful  Roman  straight- 
ness  of  aim  ?    Oh  yes,  but  only  in  his  own  old  wTiggly 
way.    There,  right  in  the  new  road  you  spy  the  same 
old  twisty  trail,  a  path  within  a  path,  a  circle  within  a 
square ;  the  African  still  dictating  to  the  white  man, 
still  utilising  him  up  to  a  certain  point  and  then  throw- 
ing him  over.     Parable,  indeed,  for  is  not  the  negro's 
way  of  walking  like  his  way  of  working  ?    Plays  with 
us  and  our  methods,  taking  just  what  suits  him,  rejecting 
all  the  rest. 

The  26th  of  June  is  our  third  day  of  this  kind  of 
thing,  and  the  facts  and  the  philosophy  of  the  situation 
alike  point  to  a  new  enemy  attacking  us  in  the  honey- 


KAV^AXGA :  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  383 

bird.  Our  meal-bags  depleted,  the  bewitching  cry  of 
this  bird  quite  disorganises  the  march,  one  man  after 
another  dropping  out  of  line  to  follow  its  lead.  Finally, 
the  percentage  of  this  defection  ranges  so  alarmingly 
from  zero  to  a  hundred  that  we  call  a  halt  for  stragglers, 
as  it  is  extremely  dangerous  to  lose  sight  of  one  another 
in  this  wilderness.  To  your  great  surprise  and  greater 
indignation,  one,  two,  even  three  hours  pass  in  waiting ; 
man  after  man  dropping  in  with  a  lordly  gift  of  whitest 
honey  and  a  pleading,  propitiatory  smile  to  atone  for  his 
crime.  ("  Own  up  and  pay  up,"  remember,  is  the  forest 
rule.)  "Would  gladly  buy  for  instant,  indignant  use  some 
of  that  wax  Ulysses  stuffed  into  the  ears  of  his  sailors 
to  pass  the  Sirens  safely.  Now  it  is  you  resolve  never, 
never  more  to  enter  on  such  a  ruinous  game  of  travel 
as  this  "  heads — I  win,  tails — you  lose "  groping  and 
guessing  in  pathless  bush.  Oh,  those  shameful  hours  of 
fret !  fret  I  fret !  Did  not  John  Wesley  say,  "  I  have 
no  more  right  to  fret  than  I  have  to  curse  and  swear"? 
Surely  this  is  the  kind  of  facetious  forest  described  by 
Gordon  Gumming  as  a  forest  of  fish-hooks  relieved  here 
and  there  with  a  patch  of  penknives. 

One  sight  I  saw  there,  far  from  human  ken,  and 
never  shall  I  forget  it — a  sort  of  glimpse  away  back  at 
prehistoric  man.  As  far  as  cold  ink  can  do  it,  let  me  tell 
you  what  I  saw — a  theme  this  for  blinding  tears.  There, 
leaping  about  from  tree  to  tree,  exactly  like  a  monkey, 
was  a  horrible  human  being  st^irk  naked.  A  poor  woman 
this  wlio  had  lived  nearly  all  her  days  as  an  animal 


384 


THINKING  BLACK 


amongst  animals,  the  bony  fingers  like  talons  of  a  hawk 
being  all  the  weapons  of  her  forest  w^arfare.  The  body 
cunningly  coloured  like  the  grey  bark  of  the  trees  in 
which  she  lived,  you  can  scarcely  for  a  moment  locate 
her,  until  you  catch  sight  of  the  black  eyes  gleaming  like 
coals  of  fire.  Then  comes  a  shriek  followed  by  a  fierce 
cataract  of  what  the  natives  call  "monkey  curses" 
{Majinge  akorowe),  and  ofi"  she  springs  from  tree  to  tree, 
twisting  her  face  into  a  grotesque  sneer.  She  has 
forgotten  how  to  speak  with  human  modulation  and  can 
only  screech,  a  literal  proof  this  of  the  Spanish  saying, 
"  Live  with  wolves  and  you  will  learn  to  howl."  Then 
a  snatch  of  curious  song  reaches  us  from  the  top  of  one 
of  the  highest  trees,  a  song-dirge  containing  a  half-hint 
that  she  was  rebel  against  her  race,  with  a  reason  : — 

"The  black  stork  croaked  into  the  town 
A  truth  that  made  the  folk  all  frown  ; 
'Twas  a  message  weighted  Avith  grief : 
'The  Earth  is  God's:  man's  a  thief!"' 

She  had  fled  the  dwellings  of  man,  poor  soul,  driven  mad 
by  the  injustice  of  her  own  tribe,  not  a  human  being  now, 
but  the  "  black  stork  "  roosting  on  branches  and  shouting 
in  rebellion  against  man  the  robber,  "The  Earth  is 
God's :  man's  a  thief."  Here  is  a  proof,  surely,  that 
insanity  is  often  only  the  logic  of  an  accurate  and 
overtaxed  mind.  Even  the  tough  blacks  with  me  nearly 
wept  at  this  sight  of  sorrow  ;  and  one  old  philosopher, 
after  a  solemn  and  dignified  pinch  of  snuff",  said,  "  Truly 
the  human  race  is  only  a  huge  beehive  :  we,  the  human 


KAVANGA:  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  385 

bees,  go  in  at  the  same  door,  but  we  don't  sleep  in  the 
same  rooms."  Nor  did  this  old  orator  doubt  that  God 
would  visit  her  tormentors  even  in  this  life  with  condign 
punishment  for  their  evil  deeds.  Only  he  was  careful 
to  explain  how  this  judgment  might  not  come.  "  They 
will  not,"  said  he,  "  become  mad,  but  they  may  become 
too  wise,  for  God  sees  to  it  that  those  who  steal  bananas 
must  pay  for  them  in  honey."  Rather  like  what  Anne 
'  of  Austria  said  :  "  God  does  not  pay  at  the  end  of  every 
day,  my  Lord  Cardinal,  but  at  the  end  God  pays."  Or 
to  mix  metaphors  a  bit.  Here  we  have  the  old  error, 
that  because  the  lightning  zigzags  it  does  not  know 
where  to  strike.  These  leafy  bowers,  though,  were 
palatial  compared  with  the  cold  ant-bear  burrows  this 
poor  woman  slept  in  when  the  forest  was  aflame  with 
lightning  heralding  wild  torrents  of  rain,  her  only  diet 
raw  wild  ants  and  rawer  snakes.  There  in  that  living 
tomb  of  clammy  clay  she  passed  the  wild  weather,  a 
curious  watch-dog  contrivance  being  the  capturing  of  a 
jackal  [Mumbulu)  which  she  tied  as  sort  of  sentry  to  the 
mouth  of  her  lair. 

"  Oh,  dwarfed  and  wronged  and  stained  with  sin, 
Behold !  thou  art  a  woman  still ! 
And  by  that  sacred  name  and  dear, 
I  bid  thy  better  self  appear." 

Cringing  forward  conciliatingly  in  her  direction,  I 
tried  to  edge  nearer,  but  no  good  !  The  least  suspicion 
of  my  approach  made  her  frantic,  and  off  she  sprang  from 
branch  to  branch  like  a  wild  thing.    Fail  though  I  did, 


386 


THINKING  BLACK 


like  a  stinging  whip-lash  to  the  conscience  came  the 
thought  that  we  might  have  saved  her  had  we  been  only 
in  the  country  in  time. 

The  pathless  forest  breaks  occasionally,  and  for  a 
stretch  of  three  hours  or  so  you  see  it  thinning  out ;  not 
now  the  dense  dark  thing  of  the  morning,  but  dotted 
over  with  large  acacias,  mimosas,  and  Euphorbias.  A 
curious  example  of  the  grotesque  in  vegetation,  these 
candelabra  top  each  sugar-loaf  ant-hill  with  the  humor- 
ous hint  that  after  sundown  they  will  be  lit  up  as  forest 
lamps.  The  stiff  spokes  have  the  insidious  suggestion 
that  they  were  artificially  hammered  out  of  bronze,  and, 
child  of  the  desert  as  this  tree  is,  surely  the  Taber- 
nacle "pattern"  (Ex.  xxv.  9)  lampstand  was  moulded 
therefrom  ?  What  suggests  this  most  forcibly  is  the  odd 
Borassus  palm  here  and  there  towering  in  the  background 
of  these  same  Euphorbias.  Here  at  least  we  know 
where  we  are.  Did  not  this  very  ventricose  palm  pose 
as  the  mason's  model  for  the  swollen  column  of  the 
ancient  temples  of  Egypt  ?  And  is  not  Egypt  the  door 
of  Africa  ?  The  Hall  of  Columns,  for  instance,  of  Seti  I., 
what  is  it  but  only  so  many  Borassus  palms  petrified  in 
a  row?  The  same  thing  this  as  the  Greeks  modelling 
their  porticoes  and  peristyles  from  the  date  palm.  If, 
however,  these  candelabras  hint  at  the  bizarre  in  Nature, 
farther  on  we  encounter  the  tragic.  Monster  cobra-like 
Lianas  hold  giant  trees  of  great  girth  in  their  death- 
grip,  the  victims  in  every  case  nearly  strangled,  and 
holding  out  pale,  pathetic  arms,  preaching  to  us  as  we 


KAVANGA:  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  387 

pass.  Was  ever  parable  so  eloquent  of  sin  strangling  the 
soul  ? 

On  and  on  you  forge,  the  tiny  track  left  behind 
scarcely  making  any  impression  on  the  stubborn  grass. 
Dare  to  drop  your  penknife,  compass,  or  anything,  and 
never  was  needle  in  haystack  so  hopelessly  lost.  Yet 
even  here  your  negro  is  an  eye-opener,  and  once  again  the 
gulf  is  seen  to  yawn  between  white  and  black,  between 
Mr.  Know  Nothing  and  Mr.  Know  All.  Watch  what 
happens.  You  make  a  dive  into  your  pocket  for — say, 
—your  compass,  and  lo,  the  conviction  stabs  you  that 
it  is  lost  Very  vaguely,  somewhere  away  back  in  that 
maze  of  forest  it  fell  to  the  ground — nay,  not  the  ground, 
for  that,  too,  is  almost  as  lost  as  your  compass  below  the 
thick  tangle  of  undergrowth.  Yet  here  is  a  lynx-eyed 
group  of  blacks  actually  daring  to  describe  that  hopeless 
maze  of  country  for  miles  far  to  the  rear.  They  know 
that  forest  as  though  they  had  planted  it.  As  though  they 
had  planted  it !  Shooting  back  in  memory  to  the  last  point 
where  the  compass  was  in  use,  there  they  are  chattering  out 
an  astoundingly  intimate  description  of  that  mad  tangle, 
tale  of  twists,  loops,  and  detours.  Precisely  as  a  London 
policeman  lecturing  Hodge  ticks  oflf  on  his  fingers  the 
requisite  number  of  streets  he  must  pass  in  order  to  reach 
the  British  Museum,  so  too  with  these  negro  i)lood- 
hounds  and  their  topsy-turvy  forest.  Now  only  a  blurred 
and  exasperating  memory  to  Mr.  Musungu,  here  you 
have  them  stringing  it  off  like  so  many  London  streets. 
This  sort  of  thing  :  "  Yes,  back  to  that  last  ant-hill,  not 


388 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  minaret-shaped  one  but  the  dome.  Then  beyond 
that,  the  calabash  tree  with  the  broken  arm.  Farther 
back  now  to  the  sycamore  with  the  hollow  in  the  trunk, 
the  hollow  one  (N.B.)  and  not  its  brother  at  the 
side.  Beyond  that  again  the  clump  of  bamboos  in 
the  dip — yes,  the  same  clump  in  which  the  guinea- 
fowls  rose."  And  so  in  thought  away  you  go,  back, 
far  back  through  that  tangle,  the  native  having 
made  a  mental  cinematograph  of  the  intricate  twists 
and  turns  as  he  passed :  trees,  grasses,  hollows,  and 
stones  all  assorted  and  ticketed  in  the  archives  of  the 
black  brain. 

Who  will  say  summarily  and  simply  what  all  this 
"thinking  black"  means?  Wherefore  these  superacute 
senses  of  the  raw  bush  negro  ?  Here  is  the  African's  own 
answer  as  scratched  down  in  my  note-book  from  his  own 
lips,  the  third  person  singular  being  originally  in  the 
narrative  nominative.  True  to  the  Roman  saying  that 
there  is  always  something  new  coming  out  of  Africa,  the 
negroes  here  pretend  to  have  made  the  great  discovery  of 
the  ages — a  sixth  sense.  This  they  call  Chumfo,  and 
sure  am  I  it  reveals  a  whole  continent  of  undiscovered 
negro  character.  Why  is  it  this  negro  can  smell  his  way 
along  ?  Why  is  it  a  black  man  miles  away  can  get 
wind  of  your  doings  ?  What  is  it  that  silently  tells  him 
all  the  mixed  motives  of  things,  their  why's  and  their 
wherefore's  ?  Why  is  it  that  two  can  only  keep  a  secret 
in  Africa  when  one  of  them  is  dead  ?  Answer :  The 
mighty  sixth  sense.    But  what  is  this  sense  No.  6  ?  As 


KAVANGA :  GATES  OF  THE  MORNING  389 


a  matter  of  fearful  fact,  here  we  have  something  very 
serious.  What  is  it  ?  The  negro  answer  is  that  the  so- 
called  sixth  sense  is  only  the  lightning  collapse  of  all  the 
senses  into  a  sudden  instinctive  unit :  not  5  +  1  =  6,  but 
5  =  1.  This  away  at  the  dawn  of  cognition  is  their 
definition  of  what  we  call  instinct.  Instinct,  that  is  to 
say,  is  the  whole  five  senses  collapsed  into  that  unit  of 
sensation  which  may  be  represented  by  the  formula  :  5  =  1. 
Now,  it  is  this  unity  of  savage  soul  that  accounts  for  the 
marvels  of  the  bush  life.  He  can  smeU  his  way.  He  is 
all  alacrity.  His  wisdom  is  not  syllogistic  but  unconscious. 
Those  five  gateways  of  the  soul  we  call  "senses"  are 
wide  open  to  Nature,  and  the  "  marconigrams  "  stream  in 
as  divergent  Five  to  collapse  at  once  into  convergent  One. 
Ask  him  to  argue  the  point  and  he  would  smile :  arguing 
is  the  five-senses  side  of  the  subject ;  at  the  centralised 
one-sensorium  he  only  knows.  This,  too,  is  the  reason  of 
the  sanctity  of  all  dear  "grandmother"  philosophy  among 
the  sons  of  men,  for  "  Granny  "  does  not  argue  the  point 
a  la  J.  S.  Mill.  She  lets  Mill  patrol  the  five  gateways 
outside,  knowing  that  they  all  radiate  in  on  her  central 
point  of  instinct : — 

"I  do  not  like  thee,  Dr.  Fell, 
The  reason  why  I  cannot  tell." 

Mill  would  have  voted  for  Dr.  Fell  and  proved  him 
lovable  :  "  Granny  kens  muckle  mair."  And  thus  the  last 
is  first,  mere  logic  beaten  by  instinct ;  for  in  God  Most 
High  have  we  not   the  apotheosis  of  instinct  ?  The 

24 


390  THINKING  BLACK 

Divine  Omniscience  being  intuitive  and  independent  of 
logic  certainly  partakes  rather  of  the  nature  of  instinct 
than  of  reason.  True  for  you,  Dr.  Holmes  :  You  can  hire 
logic,  in  the  shape  of  a  lawyer,  to  prove  anything  you 
want  to  prove. 


CHAPTER  XX 
''Great  White  Lake" 


"Where  the  sand  has  drunk  hot  tears 
From  the  brimming  eyes  of  millions 
Through  the  long  ungracious  years." 

*  *  m 

"The  tired  Lake  crawls  along  the  beach 
Sobbing  a  wordless  sorrow  to  the  moon." 

«  »  » 

"Gone  down  the  tide: 
And  the  long  moonbeam  in  the  hard  wet  sand 
Lay  like  a  jasper  column  half-upreared." 


19' 


CHAPTER  XX 


"Great  White  Lake" 

^     '^hich  there  devolve  on  the  reader 
the  duty  and  delight  of  daring  the 
first  crossing  of  Lake  Mweru  in  dug-outs. 

LA  US  DEO,  this  longest  lane  in  all  our  wanderings 
has  its  glad  turning  on  the  27th  of  the  month. 
With  a  great  gush  of  gratitude,  we  fell  in  with 
a  tiny  tell-tale  track  gradually  growing  more  defined  as 
it  led  us  out  through  a  dense  forest,  thick  with  the  lordly 
Ficus  Indica  and  the  larger  acacia.  White  with  blossom 
these  latter  were,  as  though  holding  high  festival,  the 
forest  jubilant.  Emerging  at  last,  we  look  down  on 
Mulangadi's  far-stretching  sorghum  plantations  lying  in 
the  rich  valley  of  loam  watered  by  the  Lwizi.  "  Well 
done  ! "  everybody  shouts  as  we  realise  the  real  extent  of 
these  sorghum  fields,  the  white  tops  waving  visible  as  far 
as  the  eye  can  see.  What  a  cheering  coup  d'ceil  for 
famished  men  I  Mrs.  Experience  in  Africa  is,  no  doubt, 
the  best  because  the  only  teacher,  but  I  regret  this 
excellent  school  dame  always  asks  such  terribly  high  fees. 
When  will  one  learn  even  her  A  B  C  of  expert  travel  ? 

80S 


394  THINKING  BLACK 

We  broke  another  old  law  of  African  exploration  which 
insists  that  when  the  last  stream  is  reached  you  should 
cross  and  camp  on  the  oflf  bank ;  and  here  is  our  penalty 
this  morning,  for  the  Lufukwe  has  burst  in  the  night,  carry- 
ing away  bridges  and  destroying  the  cornfields.  Moral : 
In  Africa,  to-day's  "  won't "  is  to-morrow's  "  cannot,"  and 
now  what  shall  we  do  in  the  swelling  of  Jordan,  how  shall 
we  negotiate  the  crossing  of  this  turbulent  tributary  ? 
Well,  somehow  or  other,  after  two  hours'  swimming  and 
battling  back  and  forward,  nobody  distinctly  remembering 
how,  we  get  over  at  last.  Shall  always  remember  the 
little  boys  bobbing  about  in  the  turgid  water,  frantic  all 
of  them  with  cold.  Two  went  swirling  down-stream  like 
bits  of  cork  and  were  nearly  drowned.  Pushing  on,  we 
reach  a  hamlet  and  get  the  meeting  of  the  week  at  a  most 
unlikely  place. 

The  Chief,  a  Sauga  hunter  of  great  prowess,  I  found  in 
the  hands  of  his  wives,  who  sat  in  aflfectionate  proximity 
to  their  lord,  doing  up  his  hair  into  a  most  fantastic 
coiffure.  Purring  away  like  a  big  black  tom-cat  on 
having  his  fur  smoothed  the  right  way  by  a  skilful  hand, 
his  funny  face  looked  out  on  me  from  a  forest  of  hair. 
And  by  way  of  a  looking-glass  he,  feeling  immeasurably  at 
peace  with  mankind,  occasionally  cast  vain  regards  into  a 
large  bowl  of  water  that,  he  said,  "  shadowed  "  his  black 
beauty.  Well,  this  big,  vain,  soft-hearted  fellow,  if  not 
vulnerable  himself,  led  us  out  again  and  again  in  the 
Gospel ;  and  there  was  the  Chief  Kapwasa  from  up-stream, 
just  over  his  shoulder,  taking  it  all  in.    But  truth  is  not 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE  "  395 


ours  to  pcare  and  bate  down,  so  they  had  to  get  it — the 
Evangel  of  a  heaven  above  and  a  hell  below.  This  Chief 
dances  round  about  me  with  boisterous  cordiality,  his  sole 
word  of  greeting  being  "  I !  I ! "  A  poor  enough  welcome 
if  he  knew  it,  for  is  it  not  excellent  Latin  for  "  Depart ! 
make  yourself  scarce  "  ?  Away  back  to  Adam,  I  am  their 
first  white  skin,  and  the  most  complimentary  description 
of  our  ]obster-like  integument  is  this  :  "  The  skin  of  a 
baby."  It  gets  more  serious,  however,  this  pigment 
puzzle,  but  the  final  decision  is  benighted  enough  :  "  God," 
say  they,  "  must  have  passed  through  Africa  in  the  dark 
and  did  not  see  us  properly,  but  when  He  reached  you 
whites  it  was  light,  so  He  did  not  miss  any  of  you.  Ye 
are  sons  of  the  day."  The  same  idea  this  as  when  the 
Chief,  desiring  to  let  me  know  I  was  very  clever,  said, 
pointing  to  the  solar  angle,  "  Yes,  you  were  born  at  half- 
past  seven  in  the  morning ! "  a  dense  negro  being  told 
that  he  was  born  at  twelve  o'clock  midnight.  Contrari- 
wise, the  negro  having  been  made  in  the  darkness,  some 
of  the  night  got  worked  into  the  composition  of  his  body, 
so,  black  is  he  born  and  black  he  behaves.  This  twist 
West,  though,  is  a  detour,  and  we  must  again  head  for  the 
East. 

Mweru,  the  "Great  White  Lake"  as  it  is  called, 
is  still  some  distance  off,  yet  here  it  is  a  surprise  sheet 
of  water  flashes  out  from  among  the  trees  in  the  North 
— Lake  Musengeslii  this,  and  a  discovery.  Sailed  round 
it  in  dug-outs  ;  took  soundings  all  over ;  mapped  it  by 
prismatic  and  watch,  and  baptized   tlic  thing  "  Mary 


396  THINKING  BLACK 

Lake  " — Mary  for  my  mother  and  Lake  for  itself.  Almost 
as  big  as  Lake  Dilolo,  a  curious  thing  about  this  hidden 
lacustrine  gem  is  that  it  is  only  thirty  years  old,  a  sort 
of  glorified  lagoon,  and  born  in  a  night  The  mother 
Lake  is  Mweru ;  but  one  mysterious  year  the  Luapula 
swept  a  fearful  flood  into  the  Lake,  the  water  rising  so 
high  that  it  leapt  the  low  ridge  of  hills  at  the  South 
end,  drowning  the  inhabitants  and  roaring  out  its  shame 
into  the  basin  of  this  future  Lake.  Thus  Mweru  paid 
for  it  all  in  creating  a  small  rival,  the  assuaging  waters, 
land-choked,  being,  so  to  put  it,  forced  to  open  shop 
as  a  private  firm,  Mary  Lake  the  new  signboard. 
Signboard,  I  mean  in  the  literal  sense,  for  half-way 
on  into  the  Lake  we  sighted  a  giant  tree  of  dense 
foliage,  and  there  in  the  bark  we  cut  out  the  four 
letters  of  the  new  name,  a  memorial  to  all  generations. 
Pushing  on  now,  we  breast  its  low  girding  hills,  and 
here  is  the  real  thing  at  last,  a  wide  world  of  water. 
Known  to  the  mob  as  Mweru,  this  Lake  really  boasts  of 
the  "  boa-constrictor  "  title  "  Mwerumukatamuvundaushe," 
for  in  Africa  must  not  a  big  thing  have  a  big  name  ? 

We  billeted  at  a  fishing  kraal,  an  aged,  ill-smelling 
place,  owned  jby  an  aged,  ill-smelling  man,  the  person 
probably  Shakespeare  described  as  having  "  a  very  ancient, 
fish-like  smell."  Shook  his  head  a  hundred  times  before 
I  was  done  with  him  :  could  not  make  me  out  at  all 
at  all,  and  seemed  very  sure  I  was  as  bad  as  mad. 
Nevertheless,  his  heart  was  better  than  his  head,  for 
in  order  that  his  hospitality  might  incur  no  reproach 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE"  397 


he  presented  me  with  two  fowls — two  formidably  fat 
fowls,  and  may  I  be  as  fit  to  die  as  they  were.  The 
dear  old  Gospel  had  a  poor  reception — rousing  rejection 
rather.  Told  him  I  had  come  to  allure  to  brighter 
worlds  and  lead  the  way,  and  he  hinted  that  I  might 
take  my  way  and  clear,  then  his,  oh  !  his  would  be  a 
brighter  world.  The  question  is  a  fair  one  whether 
I  did  not  antagonise  my  old  friend  with  a  too  abrupt 
mode  of  preaching  and  failure  to  polish  down  the 
asperities  of  speech.  We  live  and  we  learn,  I  trust, 
and  the  greatest  of  all  lessons  in  Africa  is  wisdom  to 
adapt  the  "  how "  to  the  "  when."  Alas,  as  you  will 
see,  subsequent  complications  proved  too  sadly  that  he 
had  every  right  not  merely  to  snarl  at  but  to  shoot 
me.    And  thereby  hangs  my  tale. 

As  though  divining  my  thoughts,  this  old  man 
turned  the  tables  by  starting  the  oldest  wrangle  in 
Africa — given  canoes  hidden  in  the  reeds,  and  an 
impatient  traveller,  to  find  the  "how"  and  the  "when" 
of  your  voyage. 

All  my  men,  poor  landlubbers  from  the  "Western 
plains,  refuse  resolutely  even  to  think  this  trans-Lake 
venture.  Looking  out  disconsolate  at  Mweru,  they  recall 
their  own  Lufira  ditch  and  see  here  the  skies  coming 
down  to  open  and  swallow  the  black  specks  of  canoes. 
Po  pa  pera  dikumhi  they  call  it,  "  Where  the  firma- 
ment ends,"  and  they  argue  that  if  the  sky  ends  there, 
man  must  end  earlier.  "  Why,  I  ask  you,  by  a  threefold 
why  (Patatu),  should  we  dare  this  voyage  ? "  .said  one 


398 


THINKING  BLACK 


of  these  solemn-faced  sacrifices  about  to  be  ofi'ered  up. 
With  no  book  but  nature,  every  little  picture  is  to  the 
negro  Christian  a  parable ;  and  here  again,  looking  out 
on  this  vast  expanse  of  skyline,  you  get  some  more  of 
his  "  thinking  black "  philosophy.  He  has  been  shut 
in  all  his  life  to  the  plains,  never  saw  such  a  pitiless 
waste  of  waters.  He  looks,  and  looks,  then  a  dreamy 
thought  comes  into  his  eye  and  he  sighs,  "  Ah  yes ! 
what  a  tragedy  that  we  humans  can  see  far  farther  than 
we  can  walk  !  "  In  other  words — how  little  our  life  agrees 
with  our  lip  !  How  little  our  word  squares  with  our  deed  ! 
To  top  all  my  trouble,  yonder  is  Kilwa  Island  lying 
off"  in  mid-Lake,  the  robber's  den  from  which  this  Arab 
Shimba  launches  his  bolts.  Darting  about  like  black 
ducks,  you  can  see  his  scout-canoes  patrolling  the  Lake, 
and  the  problem  now  stands  how  to  slip  past  these 
lynx-eyed  blacks  and  cross  Mweru.  The  very  dirt  on 
my  calico  coat  (a  thing  my  boy  tailored  for  me)  is  now 
a  boon,  for  one  startling  speck  of  white  in  a  canoe 
would  tell  tales.  Remember,  we  have  Arabs  behind  us 
as  well  as  Arabs  in  front,  and,  as  Lord  Macaulay  puts 
it,  "  Those  behind  cry  '  Forward,'  and  those  in  front 
cry  '  Back.' "  Therefore,  on  we  agree  to  go,  and  God 
be  with  us  on  the  waters ! 

Dawn  of  the  4th  of  July  saw  us  shooting  out  into 
the  hot  and  oily  waters  of  an  uncharted  sea,  Mweru 
at  this  end  describing  many  strange  curvatures  quite 
unknown  to  the  R.G.S.  Capes,  bays,  and  deltas  all 
foreign  to  the  map,  yet  old-fashioned  enough  to  the 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE  "  399 


negroes.  My  cook  can  turn  a  phrase  as  neatly  as  he 
turns  a  pancake,  and  on  taking  in  this  vastitude  of 
skyline  he  said,  "Who  ever  fought  successfully  with 
God  ?  He  killeth  even  aristocrats."  Yesterday  we  were 
in  the  grips  of  revolt — no,  never,  never  more  to  agree. 
Here  we  are  to-day  kinsmen  dear,  bound  in  the  common 
bond  of  fear  that  the  Arabs  may  nab  us.  I  felt  then 
more  than  I  had  ever  felt  before  the  essential  kinship 
of  men.  Clouds  of  water-fowl  rose  on  our  approach,  so 
dense  that  blindly  banging  with  a  No.  12  we  bring 
them  down  freely.  A  spur-wing  goose  so  falling  nearly 
killed  one  of  my  men,  the  point  of  spur  being  a  terrible 
dagger,  and  quite  serious  enough  to  brain  a  black  at  one 
blow.  The  estuaries,  however,  are  the  certain  postal 
address  of  Mweru  birds  of  every  hue,  and  from  far 
and  near  the  congeries  flock  to  a  glorious  dress  parade. 
To  commit  that  bit  of  bright-coloured  scenery  to  paper 
would  be  impossible,  the  thing  is  all  too  grand  and 
elusive.  Pelicans,  grey,  white,  and  salmon -pink  with 
yellow  pouches — as  serious  as  a  sermon;  whistling  tree- 
ducks,  black  and  white,  zebra-barred  and  chestnut ;  dainty 
lily-trotters,  black  and  white,  golden  yellow,  chocolate 
brown ;  bronze-green  cormorants  and  black  darters ; 
kingfishers,  crowned  cranes,  curlews,  sandpipers,  Ibis 
religiosa,  spur-winged  plovers  with  yellow  wattles,  black 
water-rails  with  lemon  beaks  and  white  pcncillings ; 
herons  galore,  large  grey  herons,  purple  slate  ditto, 
Goliath  ditto.  Last,  not  least — yea,  king  of  all,  the  rosy 
flamingo,  rare  as  royal,  and  peeping  selectly  out  above 


400 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  papyrus.  One  of  these  birds  I  cannot  place,  Nseva 
they  call  it,  and  they  flock  so  thickly  that  they  are 
a  proverb  for  a  united  phalanx  of  patriots.  Runic  rhyme 
this  proverb,  and  Englished  thus  : — 

"A  thousand  Nseva  rise  at  once, 
Each  one  refusing  precedence." 

Any  one  of  an  arithmetical  turn  of  mind,  I  invite  to 
consider  carefully  the  following  figures  indicative  of  the 
thickness  of  this  flock — at  one  bang  114  (one  hundred 
and  fourteen)  fell  to  the  right  barrel  of  a  Greener. 

Most  wonderful  of  all,  some  far-travelled  storks  are 
there,  daring  birds  that  have  shot  far  down  from  the 
North  :— 

"Wild  birds  that  change 
Their  season  in  the  night,  and  wail  their  way 
From  cloud  to  cloud  down  the  long  wind." 

Feeding  on  snakes,  frogs,  and  fish  as  staple  diet,  the  long 
Southward  journey  gives  them  an  en  route  chance  of  a 
crab  here,  a  shrimp  there.  In  hard  times,  where  sterile 
stretches  of  desert  must  be  crossed,  their  crop  and  stomach 
are  crammed  full  of  shells.  It  would  seem  a  wild  ex- 
aggeration to  suggest  that  these  storks  ever  saw  Egypt, 
but  not  far  East  from  here  the  whole  truth  of  migration 
came  out.  True,  a  bird  cannot  talk,  but  what  if  one  day  it 
brings  a  letter,  to  wit,  a  light  metal  ring  bearing  a  number 
and  date  fastened  to  one  leg  ?  And  what  if  the  said 
ring  proclaims  the  said  stork  to  have  been  liberated  away 
up  in  North  Germany  ?    The  ounce  of  avoirdupois  fact 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE"  401 


contained  in  this  metallic  message  dangling  from  the  dead 
stork's  leg  is  surely  worth  the  ton  of  scientific  fiction 
written  on  this  subject  of  migratory  birds — yes,  Prussia 
is  the  name  on  the  ring,  and  5th  July  the  date  thereof. 
There  is  another  link,  too,  in  this  story,  and  that  im- 
mensely important  as  indicating  the  actual  stork-route 
into  Africa.  For,  be  it  known,  this  stork  had  a  brother- 
bird  released  from  Northern  Germany  in  the  same  July 
with  the  same  metallic  data.  But  he,  poor  bird,  is  not 
made  of  steel  and  was  shot  in  Tunis,  just  as  he  was 
entering  on  the  Great  African  panorama — a  needless 
death  seemingly,  yet  how  necessary  as  a  link  in  our  chart 
of  bird-migration  !  For  here  we  see  what  really  happened. 
Sailing  South  out  of  Prussia,  full  speed  ahead,  over  Bavaria 
they  go,  over  the  Lake  of  Constance,  South,  ever  South, 
until  the  Alps  are  cleared.  Leaving  the  Adriatic  far  on 
the  left,  down  into  Lombardy  they  dart,  right  over 
Florence  and  out  into  the  Mediterranean  with  stately 
beating  pinions.  Africa  is  now  ahead,  the  land  of  sun, 
sand,  and  surprises  beckoning  them  on,  but  Tunis  sees  the 
death  of  Stork  No.  1.  (Alas,  man  and  stork  alike,  how 
often,  0  Africa,  hast  thou  killed  a  new  arrival  with  one 
such  brutal  knock-down  blow  ! )  But  Stork  No.  2  knows  a 
thing  or  two,  and  he  plans  a  route  far  from  gunshot 
range ;  nothing  less  than  the  taking  of  Africa  in  its 
longitudinal  length,  and  sailing  serenely  down  the  middle. 
Not  many  shot-guns  there,  quoth  Mr.  Stork.  So  there 
he  starts  on  his  long  African  journey,  fifty  solid  degrees 
of  latitude  ahead.    Out  of  Europe  into  Tripoli,  out  of 


402 


THINKING  BLACK 


Tripoli  into  the  Libyan  desert :  sand,  only  sand,  rolling 
like  a  sea ;  sun,  only  sun,  parching  and  pitiless.  Think, 
now,  this  weary  Libyan,  the  only  water  in  wells,  and  the 
only  wells  far  and  farther  between.  Think,  more  desert 
and  vaster,  for  now  he  enters  the  Sahara,  where  enemies 
of  the  air  begin  as  well  as  enemies  of  sun  and  thirst. 
But  still  he  sails  on,  sleeping  in  a  salt  marsh  one  night, 
roosting  up  a  yellow  acacia  tree  the  next ;  but  oh,  what 
joy  when  he  reaches  a  lake !  So  fond  of  a  bath  is  the 
good  fellow,  he  sometimes  goes  to  sleep  up  to  his  knees  in 
water ;  in  high  icy  lands  they  are  often  taken  out  in  the 
morning;,  frozen  in  all  nig-ht.  Still  South  to  the  sun  he 
comes,  crossing  over  a  branch  of  the  Nile  and  sailing  over 
the  pigmy  forest ;  but  we  are  all  pigmies  to  Master  Stork, 
so  high  in  the  air  is  he,  so  low  down  are  we.  And  now 
he  is  nearing  us,  for  away  to  the  East  he  can  spy  the  blue 
Tanganyika,  while  to  the  West  the  great  Congo  twists 
and  turns  like  a  great  water-snake.  Through  these  two 
he  comes,  and  away  far  below  he  can  see  a  curl  of  blue 
smoke  from  a  passing  village  ;  sometimes  spies  a  group  of 
hunters  out  in  the  wilds  cutting  up  game  ;  sometimes,  too, 
he  sees  a  lion  kill  a  zebra.  And  now  here  is  another 
expanse  of  blue  stretching  out  to  receive  him,  for  what 
is  this  but  old  Mweru  with  our  chimney  smoking 
away  on  the  Luanza  cliff?  But  the  end  is  not  yet. 
Veering  S.E.,  he  heads  for  his  doom,  and  one  crack 
from  a  shot-gun  ends  it  all,  life's  panorama  done  for  ever 
— story  ended,  stork  ended  in  a  flutter  of  flying  feathers 
thus !!!!!!!!!! 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE  "  403 


But  let  us  continue  our  voyage.  Gliding  past 
these  birds,  a  huge  aviary  that  beggars  all  description, 
on  and  on  we  fare ;  then  somebody  spies  certain 
suspicious  specks  of  black  far  out  to  sea — Shimba's 
scouts,  probably.  At  this  point  there  is  much  ambiguous 
whispering,  then  a  mild  mutiny  breaks  out  as  to  whether 
we  dare  push  on.  Ten,  twenty,  and  thirty  minutes  pass, 
and  now  the  black  hulls  of  the  canoes  are  seen  bearing 
down  on  us  for  all  the  world  like  tiny  torpedo-boats  :  the 
leading  log  makes  straight  for  my  boat,  a  miniature 
replica  of  the  old  sailor's  print  of  the  Arethusa  bearing 
up  to  engage  the  Belle  Poule.  But  it  is  a  mere  scare : 
these  are  Arab  scouts  who  sail  up  quite  close,  offering  the 
Fontenoy  privilege  of  first  shot,  then,  having  verified 
who  and  where  we  are,  away  they  dart  back  to  report  at 
headquarters  in  the  island.  The  result  of  that  encounter 
was  as  sad  and  sorry  a  thing  for  me  as  could  well  happen. 
For  when  Shimba  saw  that  we  had  given  him  the  slip  he 
swore  a  sudden  vengeance,  put  to  sea  with  a  flotilla  of 
dug-outs,  cut  across  Lake  to  my  old  fisher-friend  who 
grudgingly  gave  me  the  canoes  yesterday,  burned  his 
village  to  the  ground  and  dragged  him  off  in  chains. 
Not  much  cause  for  congratulation  here  :  my  visit  has 
been  a  visitation — see,  away  in  the  distance  the  village 
in  flames  !  Can  you  wonder  at  that  old  man  for  years 
and  years  shooting  an  envenomed  glance  at  the  very 
mention  of  my  name  ?  What  a  monstrous  enigma  it 
must  have  seemed  to  him,  my  preaching  of  peace  and 
claiming  to  be  an  ambassador  thereof,  whereas  the  net 


404 


THINKING  BLACK 


amount  of  peace  we  brought  to  that  poor  town  was — fire 
and  sword,  and  the  old  patriarch  dragged  oflF  in  chains. 
True,  we  had  outwitted  Shimba,  but  what  a  fly  in  the 
ointment  I 

Happily,  this  cut-throat  soon  finds  out  he  has  gone 
a  little  too  far,  for  an  escaped  fisherman  runs  away 
West  with  the  tidings,  and  after  nearly  a  week's  journey 
bursts  in  on  the  Belgian  Fort  with  a  haggard  and  agonised 
look  to  tell  the  tale.  Now  it  is  Commandant  Verdickt 
dares  a  deed  that  proves  him  to  be  the  bravest  of  the 
brave.  Following  in  our  wake,  he  strikes  the  Lake  at 
the  same  South  end,  crosses  over  to  Kilwa  Island  in 
crazy  canoes  with  a  handful  of  men,  and  dares  to  try 
to  carry  the  Arabs'  stone  fort  by  storm.  Forlorn  hope ! 
Himself  in  loud  white  jacket,  a  target  for  the  elephant- 
hunters,  one  of  his  traitor  soldiers  dares  to  wipe  oflf  an 
old  score  with  his  own  corporal,  killing  him  from  the 
rear.  This  means,  of  course,  a  pitiful  stampede,  and 
poor  Verdickt,  after  living  a  charmed  life,  is  nearly 
drowned  on  the  return  journey.  But  the  veil  that 
hides  the  future  in  Africa  is  indeed  woven  by  the  hand 
of  mercy,  for  had  we  known,  dared  we  move  ?  The 
way  of  man  is  not  in  himself,  and  here  is  our  harmless 
little  journey  spelling  out  blood,  blood,  and  yet  more 
blood. 

On  and  on  we  sail,  blissfully  ignorant  of  it  all,  our 
second  day  on  the  Lake  giving  promise  of  surprises. 
The  old  canoe-man  is  a  marvel,  talking  all  the  way 
pettingly  to  his  log ;  calling  it  by  its  baptismal  name, 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE  "  405 


and  forbidding  any  man  aboard  to  whistle,  lest  he 
bring  the  wind.  The  poise  of  this  paddler  is  a  marvel, 
his  stroke  so  rhythmic  and  sure  that  he  can  carry  on 
for  hours  without  making  a  false  move.  Late  in 
the  afternoon  we  see  symptoms  of  approach  to  land ; 
not  mainland,  however,  but  rather  a  large  unknown 
island  answering  to  the  terse  euphonious  name  of 
"Tangled  Isle"  (Disokwe).  Beyond  this  we  sight  the 
real  East  shore,  finally  grounding  among  the  reeds  at 
Lukanga.  Stiff  as  buckram,  we  spring  out  of  our 
cramped-up  canoes,  and  fall  into  Livingstone's  old  trail 
when  he  came  up  to  see  Mwonga :  the  Doctor's  compass 
and  watch  survey  is  delightfully  accurate  ;  has  a  look 
of  plod  about  it.  Heading  North  towards  Kalungwizi, 
we  foot  it  many  a  weary  mile.  Then  one  glad  day  I 
hear  the  tootling  of  an  old  cracked  bugle,  and,  at  last, 
through  the  trees,  across  the  flashing  water,  behold, 
a  bunch  of  ribbons,  once  the  dear  Jack  of  Old  England  ! 
All  that  follows  in  quick  delirious  succession  is  marked 
on  my  mind  with  vivid  distinctness,  a  memory  for  life. 
Run  down  the  slope  with  the  innocent  joy-bells  of  my 
heart  ringing,  and  drop  into  a  canoe  :  far  too  excitedly, 
though,  for  we  get  nearly  drowned  in  the  turbulent 
crossing.  Then,  as  in  a  dream,  a  white  man,  eyes  dancing 
with  delight,  grips  my  hand,  and  we  can  scarcely  utter 
a  word — he  from  the  Indian  Ocean  and  I  from  the 
Atlantic.  Thus  West  and  East  join  hands.  This,  be 
it  known,  is  one  Bainbridge  vice  Kidd,  who  died  before 
my  arrival — the  same  poor  Bainbridge  who  was  to  die  a 

I- 


406 


THINKING  BLACK 


few  days  after  I  left  him.  With  all  our  many  months' 
hoardings  of  enforced  reticence,  did  we  sleep  that  night  ? 
No !  we  talked  the  sun  up.  Sitting  inside  the  snug 
bastions  of  the  Fort,  the  soldiers  bring  a  pile  of  faggots, 
and  there  we  splice  the  two  ends  of  our  East  and  West 
cables,  comparing  notes.  Only  representative  of  his 
Queen,  there  he  is,  day  by  day,  looking  off  into  our 
wild  unknown  Interior,  two  big  business-looking  revolvers 
ever  lying  on  his  table,  and  full  of  forebodings.  Gazing 
moodily  over  at  our  terra  incognita,  little  does  he  guess 
I  am  "  boring  out"  to  join  him. 

A  few  weeks  ago  his  chief  had  been  buried  in  the 
grave  hard  by  our  fire,  and — he  is  to  follow  suit  in  a 
week.  The  poor  fellow  pours  out  his  soul  into  the  night ; 
for,  burdened  with  responsibility,  he  is  now  a  miniature 
edition  of  Great  Britain  in  breeches,  the  death  sentence 
in  his  power,  and  he  too,  alas !  in  the  power  of  the  death 
sentence.  Kinder  to  me  than  a  kinsman  dear,  he — the 
same  man  who  in  England  would  have  treated  me  to 
a  stony  British  stare — he,  even  he,  had  mercy  on  my 
limping  along  in  old  slippers  in  the  rain.  Gave  me  a 
shirt,  gave  me  hose,  gave  me  medicines.  Miniature 
edition  of  Great  Britain  indeed,  he  not  only  represented 
England's  Army  and  Navy,  but,  quite  unconscious  of 
the  inroads  I  was  making  on  his  slender  stock  of  supplies, 
I  fear  I  treated  him  as  though  he  were  an  agent  of  the 
other  Army  and  Navy — Victoria  Street ! 

But  it  is  only  past  midnight  under  the  solemn  stars 
you  get  past  the  outer  fringe  of  things,  right  home  to 


"GREAT  WHITE  LAKE"  407 


the  soul  of  a  man.  Loneliness  is  at  his  heart  like  a 
knife,  and  now  is  the  time  to  push  the  right  royal  claims 
of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  Far  too  long  have  good  folks 
in  England  sheered  off  delicately  when  these  subjects 
are  approached,  but  only  by  facing  them  can  we  con- 
ceive what  a  trap  Africa  is  to  a  newcomer.  Arriving  as 
many  young  men  do  in  this  land  wholly  unawakened 
to  the  graver  issues  of  life,  the  first  glance  they  get 
amounts  to  a  moral  slap  in  the  face.  Perchance  even 
the  scarce  Missionary  he  meets  is  of  a  sour,  mournful 
type,  who  has  missed  a  glorious  deed  of  helping  this 
newcomer.  Too  often  it  is  a  fact  that  this  Africa  robs 
a  Christian  man  of  his  victor's  song  and  leaves  him  a 
broken-spirited  jumble  of  distraction.  But  the  fact  is,  a 
mere  Missionary  in  Africa  is  lost  in  its  vast  mileage, 
a  poor  pin-point  in  the  immensity,  and  the  lonely 
Europeans  are  long  miles  apart.  Then  he  wakens  up 
to  find  what  an  elegant  fiction  is  that  loose  talk  in 
England  about  the  joys  and  manliness  of  a  "  man  being 
alone  on  his  own  feet."  Fleeing  from  cities  and  the 
"  fight  for  bread "  of  congested  towns,  he  soon  discovers 
the  value  of  dear  old  English  ways.  Even  the  starchy 
fads  of  fashion  are  seen  in  a  new  and  almost  favourable 
light.  At  sundown  his  thoughts,  like  homing  pigeons, 
travel  fast  and  far  across  the  seas  to  his  native  land. 
He  dreams  of  the  old  dainties  and  decencies  of  life 
and  longs  to  be  there.  He  drops  that  nonsense  about 
a  clerk  in  an  English  office  being  "  chained  to  his  oar-pen 
like  a  galley-slave."  Finally  and  comprehensively  he 
25 


408 


THINKING  BLACK 


sums  up  a  hundred  African  needs  in  the  dear  old  phrase, 
"  the  thin  crust  of  conventionality."  Then  it  is  England's 
boy  shrinks  suddenly  into  himself,  the  awakening  being 
rude  and  poignant.  Nor  dare  a  Missionary,  who  serves 
the  God  Whose  name  is  Jealous,  be  silent,  for  He  hath 
cursed  the  man  who  "  winketh  with  the  eye."  Gentle- 
men, to  ignore  is  to  wink,  and  thus  to  palliate,  so 
"  suffer  the  word  of  exhortation." 


CHAPTER  XXI 
A  Page  of  History 


"  Father  Nile  presents  his  compliments  .  .  .  and 
begs  leave  to  inform  the  world  that  the  Father,  at 
the  suggestion  of  the  Reverend  David  Livingstone, 
has  removed  his  head-quarters  to  a  delightful  region 
[Lake  Mweru]  about  eleven  degrees  South  of  the 
Equator,  or  Equinoxious  line,  where  for  the  present 
he  is  to  be  found  by  his  friends.  Carriages  to  set 
down  at  Cazembe,  a  couple  of  hundred  miles  or  so 
South  of  Burton's  Lake  Tanganyika.  N.B.  You  are 
heartily  welcome  to  any  refreshments  which  you  may 
bring  with  you.  Niggers  about  here  don't  need  to 
be  shot."  Mr.  Punch,  1869. 

*  4  « 

"Cartographers  in  Afric's  maps 
With  savage  pictures  fill  the  gaps, 
And  o'er  the  inhospitable  downs 
Place  elephants  instead  of  towns." 


4— 


CHAPTER  XXI 


A  Page  of  History 

H€R€IN  the  reader^  now  in 
glimmer  now  in  gloom^  watches 
these  negroes  work  out  their  destiny  in  the 
darkness. 

AND  now,  having  "  bored  "  out  East,  let  us  take  our 
bearings  :  where  are  we  ? 
In  this  all-encompassing  gloom  it  is  vital  that 
you  fasten  on  one  fact :  by  so  reaching  the  shores  of  Lake 
Mweru,  we  now  see  a  faint  streak  of  light  shooting  up 
from  Lake  Nyassa  and  along  the  Tanganyika  plateau. 
Like  a  beacon  light  visible  at  sea  from  far,  we  strain  our 
gaze  towards  Nyassa,  gladdened  to  know  that  yonder  is 
God's  lighthouse  of  Livingstonia,  shining  true.  And 
lighthouse,  remember,  is  the  true  metaphor  to  symbolise 
Dr.  Laws'  work  out  there ;  lighthouses  do  not  riricr  bells 
and  fire  cannon  to  call  attention  to  their  shining,  they 
just  shine  on.  Likewise  Livingstonia.  Nor  are  our 
Eastern  hopes  futile.  For  many  a  day  that  transport 
link  with  Chinde  succours  us,  albeit  the  real  route  of  the 
far  future  is  due  South  to  the  Cape. 

411 


412 


THINKING  BLACK 


Will  my  good-natured  reader  again  let  me  write  in 
the  first  person  singular  ?  for  the  next  link  in  our  story 
is  the  day  when  we  came  round  the  North  shore,  a 
white  man   and   a  handful   of  blacks.     The  date  is 
November,  1893.    We  have  crossed  the  Lake  in  canoes 
and  are   now  heading  back  Westward,  seeking  for  a 
Mission  site  on  the  Eastern  edge  of  our  Garenganze 
country.    My  crew  and  I  go  to  sleep  curled  up  on  the 
sand  of  the  North  shore  of  Lake  Mweru  :  that  is  to  say, 
when  sleep  comes  our  way.    In  the  white  horses  roll 
foaming,  almost  getting  at  us,  and  the  African  lets  a 
long-tongued  flame  from  the  faggots  lick  his  skin.  As 
the  wind  increases  its  whistle,  each  of  the  fisher-lads 
quietly  scoops  a  grave  of  dry  sand  into  which  he  de- 
scends, sweeping  back  a  few  inches  depth  of  sand  by  way 
of  blanketing.     Huddled  thus  all  in  a  heap,  oh  the 
confidential  chats  we  have !    Natives,  I  find,  like  you  to 
poke  into  their  little  histories,  and  generally  the  most 
ordinary-looking  little  boy  has  a  career  of  crosses.  One 
lad  of  sixteen  said  that  when  a  boy  he  used  to  hear  of 
God  far  East  among   the  Romanists,  but  his  family 
crossed  into  English  land,  and,  said  the  boy,  "  Who  ever 
heard  of  God  among  the  English  ?  "    But  against  this  put 
the  remark  of  a  young  Roman  Catholic  pupil  as  he  pointed 
to  his  brass  crucifix  :  "  Yes,  I  wear  God  round  my  neck." 
Our  appeal  to  a  man  to  break  with  the  dark  tribal  past 
only  evoked  a  song  about  potatoes,  which  I  construed  as 
indiff"erence.    On  reducing  the  song  to  writing,  however, 
it  was  not  noisy,  empty  doggerel,  but  a  preaching  parable 


LUANZA 

The  Mission  Town  built  on  the  Cliff 
overhanging  Lake  Mweru. 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY 


413 


of  my  appeal.  Said  the  song  :  "  Lombe,  you  remember, 
introduced  potatoes,  and  what  was  reckoned  poison  is  now 
staple  diet."  This  is  their  way  of  expressing  my  desire. 
Yes,  they  treat  the  Gospel  as  though  it  would  poison 
them  !  But  who  would  have  guessed  that  a  man  singing 
about  potatoes  was  really  pleading  for  an  acceptance  of 
the  Gospel?  By  the  by,  this  mention  of  diet  reminds 
me  of  the  curious  tendency  in  Africa  to  enter  a  long  spell 
of  monotony  in  one  kind  of  food.  In  the  mountains  you 
are  dosed  with  honey,  and  in  the  plains  the  everlasting 
fowl  is  your  fare  right  round  the  clock — ^just  a  little  too 
much  of  toujours  perdrix.  So,  too,  on  the  Lake  here,  it 
is  fish,  and  fish,  and  more  fish  : — 

"A  paddle,  a  row  or  sail, 
With  always  a  fish  for  a  midday  meal, 
And  plenty  of  Adam's  ale." 

Finally,  on  the  North- West  shore,  near  Luanza,  we 
made  a  find  of  a  charming  slice  of  English-looking 
territory,  the  Chief  coming  up  with  a  red  fez  stuck 
impudently  on  his  head,  and  claiming  proprietary  rights 
to  the  soil.  He  might  have  been  a  Duke  of  twenty 
descents,  so  tall  his  talk,  so  short  his  stature.  Well, 
after  long  hours  of  the  old  parrot  cry  of  "  property  in 
danger,"  we  finally  settled  the  meum  and  tuum  of  the 
thing,  and  next  day  was  appointed  for  the  delivery  of  the 
titles.  This  curious  ceremony  opened  with  the  angry 
roar  of  the  Chiefs  drums  that  lent  themselves  to  anything 
but  dulcet  harmonies ;  then  we  all  crossed  the  boundary 
brook  and  climbed  the  bluff,  a  great  ring  of  roaring 


414 


THINKING  BLACK 


blacks  being  now  formed  round  a  noble  tree — "  the  tree  of 
witness  "  this  was  called.    Here  the  Chief,  nodding  aflfably 
to  me,  stepped  out  into  the  centre  of  the  ring  and  asked 
me  to  join  him  in  the  "  signing  of  the  title-deeds."  For 
all  I  could  guess  from  this  ring  it  mio;ht  have  been  a 
prize  fight  that  was  planned  :  can  it  really  be,  thought  I, 
that  instead  of  settling  the  matter  in  black  and  white,  it 
has  to  be  finished  in  black  and  blue  ?    As  matters  turned 
out,  however,  our  conveyancing  ink  was  Napoleon's  kind 
— gunpowder.   For,  cutting  out  a  large  square  on  the  tree, 
the  Chief  called  on  me  to  fire  a  bullet  into  the  mark  ;  then, 
with  an  air  of  amused  paternity,  he,  with  a  bang,  planted 
his  copper  bullet  alongside  my  lead  one.    So  there  it  was, 
"  signed,  sealed,  and  delivered,"  the  living  tree  carrying  in 
its  bosom  the  two  "  witness-bullets,"  the  human  ring 
round  it  a  warning  to  all  men  that  this  tree  was  invio- 
late from  the  woodman's  axe.    Postal  address  :  Luanza, 
Lake  Mweru  via  Chinde.    The  cliff  rising  sheer  from  the 
blue  Lake,  a  narrow  ledge  of  flat  land  for  our  township, 
the  Bukongolo  Range  walling  the  town  hioh  at  the  back 

O  O  Id  O 

and  sheltering  it  from  the  wild  west  winds,  that  is 
Luanza.  The  other  day,  when  the  present  King  Albert 
of  Belgium  came  along,  we  sat  on  the  clifi'  verandah  look- 
ing across  to  the  far  British  shore,  and  I  asked  him  what 
he  thought  of  our  outlook.  "  Oh,"  said  he,  "  here  I  sit 
imagining  myself  at  Folkestone  looking  over  at  Calais." 

Here  it  is,  then,  on  this  bluff  overhanging  Mweru,  wc 
settle  down  in  the  dark  to  hold  on  to  the  country — motto  : 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY 


415 


Work,  wait,  and  win/  To  "  pioneer,"  I  know,  is  a  word  as 
much  abused  as  used,  but  note  what  it  means  to  us  here. 
The  Arabs  have  wiped  off  all  the  hamlets  from  the  map 
and  driven  the  Shila  folks  to  the  caves  in  the  Bukongolo 
Range — problem  :  pioneer  a  population  first  of  all.  Kuva, 
the  Lord  Paramount,  owing  to  the  stress  of  w^ar,  is  hiding 
away  somewhere  in  the  rocks  of  Bukongolo,  and  we  must 
fish  him  out  of  his  cave — problem  :  pioneer  a  kingship  in 
our  need.  Here,  too,  on  the  cliff  there  is  no  trace  of 
a  village,  everything  swept  before  the  Arab  bands  of 
raiders — problem  :  pioneer  a  township.  Nor  hut  nor 
tent  have  I — problem  :  pioneer  a  house.  Nor  food  nor 
vegetables  nor  fruit — problem :  pioneer  a  garden  and 
orchard.  Nor  book  nor  written  speech  have  they — 
problem  :  pioneer  a  literature.  Etcetera,  etcetera.  This 
"  etc.  etc."  representing  the  needle-to-the-anchor  kind  of 
business  in  which  you  are  a  jack-of-all-trades  and  very 
particularly  master  of  none.  Too  many  irons  in  the  fire, 
no  doubt,  but  in  they  go — shovel,  tongs,  poker  and  all. 
We  did  not  come  out  here  to  eat  bananas,  and  these  are 
the  words  I  wrote  in  chalk  on  the  first  mud  walls  of  my 
pioneer  cabin — 

"  The  compass  was  not  invented  by  an  astronomer, 
Nor  the  microscope  by  a  natural  philosopher, 
Nor  the  printing  press  by  a  man  of  letters, 
Nor  gunpowder  by  a  soldier." 

1  The  first  to  rally  to  our  help  at  Luanza  was  Mr.  Campbell  from  the 
West,  then  Messrs.  Arnot  and  Cohbe  from  the  East.  Ne.xt  came  the  first 
lady  who  ever  penetrated  these  wilds,  Mrs.  Crawford,  her  party  including 
Me-ssrs.  Gammon,  George,  and  Pomeroy.    After  this  can>c  the  "  John  Wilson  " 


416 


THINKING  BLACK 


Quite  a  cheery  reflection  this  for  Mr.  Robinson  Crusoe 
Africanus, 

*  ■  #  * 

But  who  said  it  was  four  thousand  miles  to  Old 
England  ?  Mocking  at  mere  mileage,  there  goes  the 
homely  tapping  of  a  woodpecker,  each  warm-hearted  tap ! 
tap  !  tap !  hinting  that  round  the  next  bend  of  the  Lake 
the  United  Kingdom  of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  may 
come  into  full  view.  Nor  is  this  all.  Flir-r-r !  goes  a 
covey  of  red-legged  partridges  trying  on  the  same  happy 
hoax,  the  very  birds  apologising  for  the  long  lapse  in 
letters,  and  sending  us  these  home-felt  sights  and  sounds 
of  theirs  as  substitute.  The  poor  little  Mission  garden 
is  also  a  policy  of  make-believe,  and  resembles  Stevens' 
Indian  one,  the  most  pathetic  thing  in  a  whole  land  of 
exile.  The  native  trees  and  shrubs  and  plants  with 
huge  leaves  flourish  raukly.  But  the  poor  little  home 
flowers,  the  stocks  and  mignonette  and  wallflowers ! 
They  struggle  so  gallantly  (like  the  Mission  lady  and 
Mission  baby)  to  persuade  you  that  this  is  not  so  very 
far  from  England,  and  they  fail  so  piteously.  They  will 
flower  in  abundant  but  straggling  blossoms,  but  the  fierce 
sun  withers  the  first  before  the  next  have  more  than 
budded.  It  is  a  loving  fraud,  but  a  hollow  one.  The 
very  wallflowers  cannot  be  more  than  exiles.  Yet  here 
in  this  affectation  of  a  garden  you  have  the  pulse  of  the 

party,  tbe  only  remaining  member  of  which  is  Mr.  Iliggins.  Then  don't 
forget  Miss  Jordon!  Both  winning  and  wise,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Higgins  have 
held  on  all  these  years  without  release,  the  last  stop-press  news  being  that 
their  far-off  Luanza  liouse  has  gone  up  in  smoke. 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY  417 

whole  African  puzzle.    For  granted  you  battle  with  and 
win  a  feeble  flower  from  the  silly  soil,  where  is  the 
perfume  ?    And  precisely  as  you  sniff  in  vain  for  the  old 
whiff  of  the  mignonette,  even  so  with  the  emigrant  English- 
man.   He  too  loses  his  bloom  and  fragrance,  and  Africa 
soon  robs  him  of  his  genial  smile.    But  he  that  hath 
ears  to  hear  can  get  a  thousand  such  sermons  all  over 
Africa,  and  every  day.    For  instance,  learn  a  parable  of 
the  fig  tree.    Glance  at  those  Mission  doors,  a  pioneer 
effort  in  carpentry.    The  good  fellow  made  a  dive  into 
the  adjoining  jungle,  and  after  felling  a  fig   tree  he 
laboriously  ripped  the  planks  for  his  first  doors  and 
tables.    The  which  is  a  perfect  parable.    For  that  wood 
was  as  green  as  the  Missionary  who  cut  it,  and  after  a 
few  months  those  tightly  fitting  boards,  so  full  of  sap, 
shrank  into  yawning  cracks,  a  sorrow  and  an  eyesore. 
How  like  the  fresh  young  Missionary,  the  first  year  how 
neat  and  trig ;  the  second,  how  warped  and  shrunken  ! 
For  as  long  as  sap  is  sap  and  sun  is  sun,  the  latter  will 
soon  suck  up  the  former,  and  the  Mission  door  will  be 
like  the  Missionary  who  made  it.    Learn,  therefore,  a 
parable  of  that  fig  tree.    When  its  branch  is  yet  young 
and  tender,  and  shooteth  forth  its  leaves,  then  ye  know — 
that  it  is  not  the  time  to  make  doors  and  tables  !  Their 
very  word  for  "leaves"  has  a  Biblical  ring  in  it.  It 
means  "  the  tellers,"  the  idea  being  that  they  mark  the 
change  of  seasons,  and  all  appeal  to  the  leaves,  i.e.  "  the 
tellers,"  as  proof  positive  that  the  season  has  changed. 
Thus  the  phrase,  "  When  ye  see  the  leaves  then  yc 


418  THINKING  BLACK  . 

hnoiv  that  summer  is  nigh,"  is  as  African  as  it  is 
Biblical. 

Nowadays  we  are  all  better  off  and  dine  on  a  better 
diet — better  off,  yes,  but  are  we  better  ?  Sharp  is  the 
contrast  between  a  London  "slummer"  and  the  modern 
African  Missionary  on  his  highly  respectable  station. 
Pause  half  a  moment  and  consider.  Note  this  curious 
new  word  "  Station "  we  begin  to  use  in  Africa,  a  new 
word  for  a  distinctly  new  idea.  You  will  search  the 
dictionary  in  vain  for  its  meaning,  and  the  Acts  of  the 
Apostles  too.  Yet  this  term  can  with  special  fitness 
stand  for  the  idea,  because  this  is  the  thing  that  anchors 
the  Missionary.  Not  a  sheep-run  nor  a  railway  station, 
but  a  Mission  Station — in  a  word,  an  isolated  estate 
some  hundreds  of  yards  or  acres  square  on  which  the 
Missionary  lives  as  magnate  of  the  district.  Station  in 
name  and  station  in  nature  is  such  a  place,  for  it  forces 
the  preacher  to  be  as  stationary  as  his  station  :  the  native 
must  come  to  the  Missionary,  and  not  the  Apostolic 
contrary.  And  what  if  this  lightly-come  lightly-go  negro 
runs  oflf  seeking  pastures  new  ?  Hoiv  can  the  stationary 
Missionary  folloiv  him?  The  danger  is  that  in  this 
Africa  ever  on  the  move,  this  Africa  peopled  by  roaming 
tribes,  the  natives  spasmodically  scratch  the  soil  in  one 
valley  for  three  or  four  years  and  then  flit  to  new  districts 
for  new  fields.  Remember  rural  Africa  cannot  boast  one 
plough,  only  hoes ;  and  this  is  fatal  to  fixed  population. 
He  only  scratches  the  soil  and  then  moves  on  ;  not  one 
of  them  will  play  the  man  and  dig  deep.    Nor  has  he 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY 


419 


any  coal,  only  forest  faggots,  and  these  he  soon  runs 
through,  owing  to  his  deforestation  for  corn-growing. 
Here,  then,  in  lack  of  firewood  we  see  another  factor 
driving  him  on.    Face  this  moving-on  problem. 

Up  go  the  stately  buildings  of  the  white  man  and 
down  go  the  mud  huts  of  his  black  neighbour.  No.  1 
just  getting  in  as  No.  2  is  moving  out.  Alone  the 
Missionary  finds  himself,  the  clannish  coalescence  of  his 
parishioners  outwitting  his  plans.  Leading  up  to  this 
point,  all  has  been  hypocritical  silence,  and  the  foreigner 
with  innocent  serenity  thinks  his  black  neighbours  are 
a  fixture,  so  he  settles  down  to  build,  which  also,  alas ! 
means  building  to  settle  down.  "  Strangers  and  pil- 
grims," yes ;  but  the  Devil  has  all  the  pilgrims  and  Christ 
all  the  strangers,  for  we  saints  are  anchored  with 
impedimenta  when  the  sinners — the  natives — are  up  and 
away.  There  on  the  off"-bank  of  a  brawling  stream  you 
have  the  pro  tern,  native  village  only  a  few  thousand 
yards  distant  in  measure  but  many  thousand  miles  in 
mind  and  manners.  Behold  the  grotesque  contradiction 
of  the  thing ! — a  middle-class  Missionary  acclaimed  as  the 
local  Carnegie,  staggering  rich,  no  poverty  of  the  Cross, 
no  stigma  of  shame,  but  contrariwise  a  grovelling  negro 
lauding  him  as  lord  and  master — a  poor  enough  start  for 
the  dear  old  Gospel.  So  very  much  is  the  African  a 
servant  of  servants  that  he  outwits  the  Missionary,  who 
should  be  a  servant  of  all ;  and  here  in  this  initial  wrong 
Christ  is  wounded  in  tlie  house  of  His  friends,  Christianity 
equating  wealth,  not  poverty.    Bring  the  African  to  book 


420  THINKING  BLACK 

on  this  subject,  call  it  all  a  blinding  delusion,  tell  him 
you  are  really  as  poor  as  he  thinks  you  are  rich  ;  I  say, 
tell  him  this,  and  into  that  negro  eye  of  his  comes  a 
magpie  gleam  accusing  you  of  mendacity.  To  split  a 
hair  on  the  difference  between  real  and  relative  riches  is, 
to  the  naked  negro,  an  unworthy  juggling  with  words — 
are  we  not  "  the  people  of  God,"  and  does  not  the  very 
name  of  the  Creator  mean  greatness  and  prestige  in  local 
lingo  ? 

But  let  us  look  at  our  Lake  now.  For  six  mouths 
in  the  year  there  is  a  South-Wester  thundering  in 
on  our  shore,  a  wind  adversely  in  the  teeth  of  our 
schooner  ^  when  travelling  up-Lake.  Beginning  in  April 
and  blowing  through  the  dry  season,  the  monsoon  is 
so  distinctly  rainless  that  the  season  commonly  takes  its 
name  from  it.  A  good  guess  at  Meteorology  this,  for, 
blowing  over  the  highlands  of  the  Transvaal  as  it 
does,  where  could  it  get  rain  from  ?  The  commence- 
ment of  rains  coincides  with  the  change  of  monsoon. 
A  deterrent  on  the  water,  this  same  wind  is  a  saving 
boon  on  land,  blowing  in  on  us  on  the  bluff  when  the 
heat  is  at  its  heisjht.  Not  the  wild  salt  winds  of  the  sea 
with  famous  curative  virtues — oh  no  ! — for  when  a  man 
has  incipient  fever  they  strike  a  chill  to  his  marrow, 
generally  bringing  the  attack  to  a  head.  Towards 
October  we  approach  the  change  of  seasons,  when  we 

1  Well  flone,  Greenock  1  Across  sea  and  laud  loj'al  hearts  sent  that 
splendid  iron  boat,  and  for  years  it  was  indispensable. 


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421 


have  our   greatest  meteorological   disturbances  on  the 
Lake,  and  on  the  cliff  at  Luanza  we  need  all  the  hold 
we  have  of  the  rock,  the  wind  heralding  torrential  rains 
sweeping  down  the  gorges  in  wild  rugging  gusts.  Look- 
ing out  to  the  Lake,  you  can  descry  a  hardy  fisherman 
nursing  his  "  dug-out "  in  a  grey,  cruel  sea :  exactly  the 
opposite  of  the  old  Francis  Drake  style,  these  canoes 
have  high  viking  prows,  and  sterns  almost  flush  with 
the  water.    He  has  christened  his  log  by  a  lucky  name, 
and  when  far  out,  talks  pettingly  to  the  boat  as  his  own 
familiar  friend.    Transacting,  as  he  thus  does,  in  honest 
ways,  the  honest  business  of  a  fisherman,  it  is  a  pity 
he  spoils  it  all  by  a  curious  mid-Lake  ceremony  called 
"  the  cursing."    What  this  amounts  to  is  bluntly  a  fierce 
cataract  of  oaths  in  which  he  apostrophises  all  the  dead 
men  in  the  Lake.    Singling  them  out  by  name,  he  curses 
them  with  all  the  gall  and  bitterness  of  a  presumably 
doomed  man — the  presumption  being  that,  all  alone  as 
he  is  in  far  mid-Lake,  the  dead  men  will  drag  him  down 
to  the  deep.    Then  there  is  a  pause,  but  the  stubborn 
silence  of  the  Lake  only  stiffens  him  in  his  resolve  to 
keep  cursing.    Making  a  clean  circle  of  the  Lake  hamlets, 
he  challenges  all  the  dead  chiefs  by  name,  the  volley 
of  oaths  [Majinge)  being  to  the  accom})animent  of  a 
curious  rat-a-tat  noise  he  makes  with  a  drumstick  on 
the  side  of  the  boat.    The  livelier  the  fish  rug  at  his 
two  long  lines  tied  to  his  two  great  toes,  the  louder  do 
these  curses  rend  the  air.    Sure,  if  ever  food  needed  to 
be  "  sanctified  by  pniyer,"  these  fish,  the  fruit  of  cursing, 


422 


THINKING  BLACK 


deserve  a  purifying  "  grace  before  meat " !  Yet  what 
shall  we  see  the  great  Kazembe  do  with  these  very  fish  ? 
Will  he,  too,  not  dine  to  a  cataract  of  curses  ? — the  very 
fish  cursed  in  their  catching  being  again  cursed  in  their 
cooking. 

But  here,  incredulous  as  it  may  seem,  the  wheel  goes 
full  circle  once  again,  and  the  erstwhile  curser  can  now  be 
heard  singing  a  solemn  Te  Deum.  Yet  this  fisherman, 
remember,  claims  he  is  only  cursing  demons,  for  forthwith 
with  the  same  mouth  blesses  he  God.  Certain  it  is  that 
for  centuries  this  quaint  old  song  of  deliverance  has  been 
sung  as  a  cast-iron  formula  by  all  Shila  men  who  were 
capsized  but  came  safe  to  land.  Greeting  him  with  song  at 
the  Njiho,  or  landing-place,  all  the  women-folk  burst  out 
into  a  "  God-song,"  as  it  is  called,  the  escaped  fisherman 
joining  them  in  the  chorus.  Simple  enough  in  its  diction, 
the  whole  value  of  this  praise-song  is  to  be  found  in  its 
archaic  terminology,  the  very  grammar  of  the  thing  being 
steeped  in  most  ancient  twang  : — 

"  O  God,  the  minnows 

Had  nigh  feasted  on  me  ; 
But  Thou,  O  God, 
Didst  rescue  me  !  " 

Then,  when  the  "praise  procession  "  reaches  the  hamlet, 
first  among  all  his  treasures  to  be  produced  is  the  great 
"  horn  of  salvation,"  as  it  is  called,  a  horn  this  crammed 
full  of  charms,  and  in  symbolic  idea  a  real  cornucopia. 
All  life's  successes  are  ascribed  to  its  mediation,  and  the 
"  horn  is  exalted"  accordingly.    This  song  of  deliverance 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY 


423 


idea,  remember,  is  not  peculiar  to  one  tribe  only,  for  the 
very  vilest  type  of  cut-throat  negro  does  the  same  thing. 
The  infamous  Rugaruga,  for  instance,  whose  very  name  on 
the  Lake  became,  as  we  have  seen,  the  verb  to  murder 
and  loot,  these  too  have  a  cast-iron  formula  of  "  God's 
thanks  "  when  they  escape  in  war.  Say  a  bullet  whizzes 
past  his  ear,  and  at  once,  conscious  of  having  been  saved 
from  death,  he  interjects  the  ancient  prayer :  "0  God, 
my  Deliverer,  never  again  will  I  revile  Thee  ! "  Not  a 
chance  idea  this,  please  note,  but  a  technical  prayer, 
proving  once  more  that  God  hath  not  left  Himself  without 
a  witness,  even  in  the  darkest  hour  of  a  dark  land.  Right 
in  from  the  far  Ocean,  piercing  the  darkest  hole  of  Africa 
with  a  shaft  of  light,  is  this  all-pervading  knowledge  of 
God-Creator. 

Without  labouring  the  point,  I  have  already  urged 
that  the  most  obdurately  deaf  negro  (deaf  to  your 
entreaties,  I  mean)  would  resent  with  extreme  asperity 
any  notion  that  he  denied  the  immortality  of  the  soul : 
that  is  not  arguable.  Let  me  prove  this  by  describing  one 
memorable  meeting  I  held  in  that  same  Kalaraata's  town 
among  the  cannibals,  a  meeting  held  on  the  day  subsequent 
to  my  seeing  a  man  eating  human  flesh.  You  wonder  how 
these  hell-hounds  can  understand  the  Gospel ;  especially  if 
the  fugitive  preacher  has  to  push  on  past  their  place  a  few 
miles  before  his  camp  for  the  night  is  reached.  Well,  here 
is  a  typical  meeting  on  virgin  soil,  and  you,  niy  reader, 
shall  judge  whether  Paul  spake  not  the  truth  when  he 
wrote  that  "  God  hath  not  left  Himself  without  witness." 


424 


THINKING  BLACK 


The  deep-voiced  sycamore-drum  calls  them  in,  an  ugly, 
verminating  throng  almost  in  puris  naturalibus — there 
behold !  the  uttermost  man  in  the  uttermost  parts  of 
the  earth.    (Yonder,  too,  on  the  throne  of  God,  do  not 
forget  the  Christ  Who  can  save  to  the  uttermost.)  Sup- 
porting me  on  my  near  right  is  the  Chief,  as  Chairman, 
with  whom  I  propose  a  loud  Socratic  dialogue,  not  as 
preacher,  but  merely  inquirer,  with  note-book  respectfully 
open.    No  skimming,  skirting,  and  shirking  of  difficulties 
here ;  I  simply  ask  and  he  simply  answers ;  why  not  ? 
"  A  big  horse  takes  a  big  fence,"  and  this  big  black  is  on 
for  big  business.    Note,  please,  also,  that  I  have  given — 
on  the  strength  of  Paul's  above-quoted  words — the  bold 
initial  guarantee  that  I  will  neither  intrude  nor  innovate 
one  new-fangled  idea  in  the  meeting.    The  theme  for  the 
day  is  "  God  ! "  and  having  got  a  thousand  voices  to  hush 
the  ineffable  Name  three  times,  we  settle  down  to  Bible- 
business.    Well,  to   anticipate,  it   turns  out  that  the 
subject  of  our  choice  is  a  gold-mine  ;  not  only  about  God 
is  it  but  from  God  too.    Asked  their  name  for  Him,  the 
answer  comes  sharp  and  short  from  the  Chairman-Chief, 
"  Vidie  Mukulu,"  i.e.  the  great  King.    And  here  comes 
the  opening  in  question  No.  2  :  "  You,  the  King  of  these 
parts,  tell  me,  please,  what  your  kingship  involves." 
Answer — a  long  string  of  kingship  paraphernalia  :  Primo, 
a  King  has  laws  ;  secundo,  a  King  has  a  Chipona  cha 
Chidie  =  a  judgment-seat ;  tertio,  a  King  has  subjects, 
loyal  or  rebellious ;   quarto,  rewards  and  punishments, 
and  all  rebellions  quelled  within  his  borders.    And  now 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY  425 

comes  the  Missionary's  opening,  for  had  not  a  thousand 
voices,  nem.  con.,  declared  that  God  was  the  great  King 
{Vidie  Mukulu^)'^.    Sharp  and  sudden,  you  flash  in  upon 
them  the  question,  "  And  so  God  has  all  these  kingship 
rights  too  ?  "    Now  is  the  momentous  moment  for  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  Holy  Bible.    "  A  King  has  laws,  has  he  ? 
Well,  here  they  are,  the  great  King's."    "  A  King  crushes 
rebellion,  does  he  ? "    And  so  on  you  go,  rigorously  in- 
novating n-o-t-h-i-n-g,  but  merely  building  on  their  own 
adjective  "great"  governing  their  own  noun  "King" — 
God  demonstrated  a  great  King  preaching  great  peace  by 
the  great  Lord  Jesus  Christ  to  His  subjects  in  revolt.  Thus 
out  of  his  own  mealy  mouth  you  judge  Him  a  great  King  ; 
even  to  this  man-eater  postulating  a  great  Judgment-Seat, 
great  Laws.    All  this,  too,  far,  far  in  a  Central  Africa 
beyond  the  reach  of  any  Mission  by  whatsoever  name 
named.    How  vivid  many  a  Pauline  statement  becomes  ! 
Run  down  the  Acts,  and  note  those  Apostolic  speeches  ; 
to  a  congregation  with  its  vellum  copies  of  "  Prophets  and 
Psalms"  these  were  profusely  quoted.    But  when  Paul 
took  his  plucky  plunge  into  Gentiledom  he  ever  preached 
and  practised  God  nigh  at  hand,  God  touching  their 
Gentile  lives  at  every  point :  yea,  in  God  they  lived  and 
moved  and  had  their  being.    Quite  a  different  thing 
this,  remember,  from  the  folly  of  pretending  to  preach 
to  the  God  in  a  man — how  can  God  be  in  the  soul 
when  Paul  says,  "At  that  time  ye  were  ivithout  God"? 

1  Thia  great  God-title  is  most  interestingly  found  even  in  the  far  North, 
beyond  the  Luban  language  limit. 
26 


426 


THINKING  BLACK 


The  only  God  in  a  negro  is  the  god  of  this  world,  the 
Devil.    But  look  at  our  blue  Lake  again. 

To  speak  of  Lake  Mwexu's  "  trough "  as  geographers 
do  of  Tanganyika  is  wrong,  for  although  the  Bukongolo 
Range  rises  sheer  on  the  West,  trenched  to  a  singular 
degree  with  brooks  and  streams,  all  leaping  into  the 
Lake,  yet  Mweru  is  not  the  big  evaporation-vat  that 
Tanganyika  and  every  other  locked-in  lake  must  be. 
The  Lukuga  drainage  notwithstanding,  Lake  Tanganyika 
water  is  notoriously  nasty.  In  spite  of  all  that 
salt,  sulphate  and  carbonate  of  lime,  and  sulphate  of 
magnesium  dissolved  and  washed  down  every  year  by 
erosion  of  water,  the  whole  is  soon  in  motion  and  joins 
the  Lualaba  exit-flow,  every  cubic  foot  of  water  entering 
at  the  Southern  doorway  having  to  pay  toll  at  the 
Northern  exit.  As  though  guarding  this  exit  doorway, 
there  is  a  patrol  of  pugnacious  hippos,  known  familiarly 
to  all  natives.  The  old  patriarch  of  this  clan  is  a  dis- 
agreeable veteran  who  often  lies  sunning  himself  at  full 
length  on  the  flat  rock  just  midway  across  the  Lualaba 
mouth.  He  definitely  hunts  men,  and  has  shivered 
many  a  canoe  with  gusto.  The  Vasayila,  or  harpoon- 
men,  have  for  years  exerted  all  their  blandishments  on 
his  tough,  tight  skin,  but  he  has  lived  to  a  green  old 
ase,  rich  in  honours.  Of  course,  there  is  sorrow  on 
the  Lake,  as  all  the  little  fishing  hamlets  know  well, 
and  often  a  dug-out  puts  out  to  sea  never  to  come 
back  again,  the  forementioned  ring  of  hippos  having 
all  to  do  in  the  matter.    For  this  reason,  no  native  hjis 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY  427 

been  known  to  cross  Mweru  direct,  all  insisting  on  making 
the  detour  round  the  North  end.  Along  the  shores,  the 
canoes  dart  about  like  wild-fowl,  while  far  out  you  can 
descry  an  odd,  daring  Shila  man,  his  dug-out  appearing 
as  a  dark  speck,  rising  and  falling  on  the  crest  of  the 
wave.  "  Nursing "  his  canoe  he  calls  it,  and  even  in  a 
grey,  cruel  sea  that  game  of  pitch-and-toss  he  plays  with 
the  Lake  is  a  safe  thing,  even  in  the  angriest  storm. 
Down  dips  the  dug-out  into  the  water-trough,  only  to 
reappear  riding  the  wave  with  the  safety  of  a  duck.  A 
mere  log,  it  must  mount  every  wave,  nor  dare  it  cleave 
even  one :  no  wonder,  therefore,  it  curtsies  so  deeply  to 
the  blast  out  of  sheer  respect.  He  is  making  a  try  for 
something  good  for  supper  and  has,  all  the  while,  en- 
shrined in  his  vision,  the  picture  of  the  log-fire  with  wife 
and  children  squatting  round.  Long  before  Europe  got 
wind  of  the  idea,  these  canoes  were  fitted  with  invisible 
marconigram  apparatus,  for  the  most  tenacious  legend 
of  these  fishermen  is  that  they  are  perfectly  au  courant 
with  their  wives'  doings  at  home.  This  mysterious  union 
is  so  real  that  any  act  of  infidelity  on  her  part  is  doomed 
to  react  prejudicially  on  her  fisherman  out  at  sea.  Thus 
all  cases  of  drowning  are  brought  home  to  the  "guid- 
wife,"  just  as,  on  the  contrary,  she  accepts  with  smug 
complacency  the  tribute  of  being  the  ctKcient  cause  of 
a  good  haul  of  fish.  For  during  all  the  time  of  her 
husband's  absence  in  mid-Lake  has  she  not  kept  the 
dozen  "  taboo "  rules  sacredly  ?  She  dared  not,  for 
instance,  raise  her  hand  to  the  shelf  in  her  hut,  nor 


428  THINKING  BLACK 

dared  she  shake  hands  with  any  one.  To  cook  food  was 
also  severely  taboo  during  her  fisherman's  absence,  nor 
could  any  stranger  cross  the  threshold  in  his  absence. 
This  last  custom,  indeed,  is  so  rigid  that  the  tribal  name 
is  derived  therefrom,  the  fisherman  always  drawing  a 
circle  barrier  round  his  hut  to  debar  entrance  in  his 
absence.  Hence  Shila  =  to  draw  a  line,  from  which  the 
in  extenso  tribal  name  comes,  Vashilanandanediango. 
Thus  the  Lake-dwellers  boast  of  a  name  as  long  as  the 
Lake's  own  title. 

Such  long  names  are  quite  a  cartographic  curio,  and 
are  explained  by  the  Central  African  idea  that  as  name 
equates  nature,  therefore  anything  big  must  have  a  corre- 
spondingly big  name.  Hence  it  is  these  great  Lakes  of 
the  Interior  all  boast  long  "  boa-constrictor "  names 
unknown  to  map-makers.  For  instance,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  plain  Mweru  of  the  R.G.S.  maps  is  only 
Mweru  in  the  same  short  sense  as  Tom  =  Thomas,  or 
Will  =  William.  Only,  however,  in  the  serious  debate  of 
the  forensic  negro  elders  can  you  hear  Lake  Mweru 
called  by  its  full-dress  name  of  Miverumukatamuv- 
undanshe. 

Obviously  too  big  for  plain  workaday  speech,  this 
long  comet  of  a  name  loses  its  streaming  tail,  and  brief, 
blunt  Mweru  is  the  normal  usage.  Nor  is  this  a  fancy 
freak  peculiar  to  one  corner  only.  Take  the  good  Living- 
stone's own  Bangweulu  as  another  example.  In  his 
anxiety  that  people  should  not  call  it  "  Bungy-hollow," 
he  himself  was  "out"  in  the  spelling  of  his  two  final 


A  PAGE  OF  HISTORY 


429 


vowels.  But  the  important  point  to  note  is  that  even 
this  longish  name  is  only  a  mere  apocope,  like  its  twin- 
sister  Mweru.  For  the  Tom = Thomas  analogy  is  as 
nothing  to  the  fact  that  Bangweulu  is  only  the  curtate 
form  of  the  real  name,  Bangweuluwavikilwanshimango- 
mwana.  If  you  laugh  at  the  fisher-folk  for  such  a  long- 
winded  title,  they  will  quote  the  proverb,  "  Big  thing, 
big  name."  And  if  you  still  refuse  to  bow  to  the  sanity 
of  the  idea,  they  clinch  their  postulate  with  the  sister- 
proverb,  "  Little  beef,  little  juice."  Now,  although  this 
seems  mere  black  verbosity,  these  long  names  are  really 
a  philological  boon,  deciding  at  a  glance  the  real  inner 
meaning  of  the  Lake's  name.  A  geographer  in  London 
without  the  clue  of  this  full  name  could  toy  with  his 
pencil  for  weeks,  trying  to  solve  the  meaning  of  brief 
"  Mweru,"  and  would  fail,  because  the  solution  is  all 
locked  up  in  this  hidden  longer  name.  For  instance, 
the  Mweru  mouthful,  parsed  literally,  is  unerringly 
rendered  "  Great-White-Lake-Locust-Drowner "  {i.e.  too 
wide  an  expanse  for  locusts  to  dare  to  try  to  cro.ss  with 
impunity).  So,  too,  with  the  geographic  mouthful  repre- 
senting the  true  name  of  Bangweulu.  This  only  means 
"  The- Lake -so-stormy-that-it-must-be-propitiated-by-the- 
voyager-  and-so-wide  -  that  -  you  -  must  -  take  -provisions- 
aboard-for-a-trans- Lake-voyage."  So,  for  orthographical 
pains  you  get  philological  gains,  and  the  names  are  as 
easy  to  parse  as  they  are  hard  to  pronounce. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
Black  Man  =  Black  Manners 


"  The  thing  that  hath  been,  it  is  that  which  shall 
be :  and  there  is  no  new  thing-  under  the  sun." 

Solomon. 

*  *  » 

"When  I  was  a  boy  in  Gaul  I  beheld  the  Scots, 
a  people  living  in  Britain,  eating  human  flesh ;  and 
although  there  were  plenty  of  cattle  and  sheep  at 
their  disposal,  yet  they  would  prefer  a  ham  of  the 
herdsman  or  a  slice  of  female  breast."  Jerome. 

*  ♦  » 

"  For  are  ye  not  as  the  children  of  the  Ethiopians 
unto  Me,  O  children  of  Israel  ?  saith  the  Lord. " 

Amos. 


43» 


CHAPTER  XXII 


Black  Man  =  Black  Manners 

pjyHER  EIN  the  reader  finds  that  the 
African  so  debases  his  surround- 
ings that  the  surroundings  take  revenge 
and  debase  the  African. 

IVORY  is  pouriDg  into  the  villages,  and  with  it  come  the 
fine  old  fellows  who  tackle  Jumbo,  following  him  up 
even  into  the  marshes,  where  they  run  a  risk  of  being 
snapped  at  by  a  crocodile.  An  odd  elephant  has  been  known 
to  avenge  man  and  teach  Mr.  Crocodile  a  lesson,  one  instance 
having  occurred  when  I  was  at  Kashobwe's.  The  elephants 
came  down  in  the  tropical  effulgence  of  moonlight  to  bathe 
in  the  fen-marshes,  their  gleeful  splashing  quite  lively. 
Timid  little  baby  calves  shrinking  on  the  edge  and 
refusing  to  plunge,  the  mother  coming  up  and  squirting 
a  shower-bath  as  their  share  in  the  fun.  Comical  little 
rogues  these,  standing  about  four  feet  high,  skin  falling  in 
folds  and  far  too  big  for  them.  There  they  are,  looking 
exactly  like  a  dozen  youngsters  wearing  the  coats  and 
trousers  of  their  elder  brothers.  This  submerged  marsh, 
however,  be  it  noted,  is  alive  with  "  crocs,"  and  these 

433 


434 


THINKING  BLACK 


reptiles  quite  coolly  commence  to  nip  poor  Jumbo's  toes, 
forgetful  of  the  fact  that  Jumbo's  trunk  is  Jumbo's  glory. 
At  any  rate,  Nemesis  falls  like  a  bolt  from  the  blue,  for, 
smacking  like  a  long  whip,  down  comes  that  elephant's 
trunk,  twisting  round  the  crocodile's  tail,  and — tableau  ! 
With  one  half-shriek,  half-squeak,  the  long  greenish- 
yellow  croc  is  sent  flying  over  the  marsh — flop ! 
splash  !  thirty  yards  ofi'.  That  deft  tight  grip  the  tusker 
took  of  the  huge  reptile's  tail,  and  the  way  in  the  moon- 
light he  waved  it  theatrically  aloft  like  the  figure-of-eight 
smack  of  a  whip,  doubtless  made  that  crocodile  unto  the 
third  and  fourth  generation  resolve  never  again  to  nibble 
at  an  elephant's  toes. 

The  mannish  type  of  woman  here  even  tackles  a 
crocodile,  and  Madam  Luban  is  not  too  finicking  in  the 
choice  of  a  weapon.  These  ladies  are  quite  deft  with 
the  short  national  knife,  and  two  of  them  attacked  a 
crocodile  in  best  Amazon  manner.  They  had  gone  down 
to  the  fishing-weir  to  empty  the  wicker  baskets  when 
a  lurking  croc  shot  out  at  them  with  a  snap.  Taking 
advantage  of  the  fact  that  when  this  beast  misses  a  first 
grab  he  must  pause  to  unlock  his  teeth,  these  plucky 
women  attacked  him  with  their  two  short  knives  and 
finished  him  in  a  few  minutes.  But  what  a  weird 
business,  the  long  yellow  crocodile  writhing  with  his 
wounds,  and  snap,  snapping  his  white  teeth  in  chagrin ! 
The  two  women  flowing  with  blood  yet  never  a  wince ; 
two  paltry  penknives  doing  it  all.  And  all  the  while 
yonder  is  a  heron  fishing  on  a  sand-spit,  chuckling  with 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  435 

glee.  Quite  the  largest  of  these  Saurians  ever  seen 
hereabouts  was  found  farther  up,  dead  by  its  own  act 
of  folly.  Nor  knife  nor  spear  killed  this  monster,  only 
its  own  vile  voracity  :  the  crocodile  killed  the  negro,  and 
the  killed  man  killed  the  crocodile.  Washed  up  on  the 
bank,  the  dead  monster  lay  four  feet  high — not  long — 
with  a  tell-tale  human  armbone  sticking  out  of  its  chest. 
The  old  fisherman  who  acted  as  sort  of  "  Crocodile 
Coroner  "  on  the  occasion,  clearly  and  convincingly  proved 
that  the  reptile,  instead  of  making  one  sure  bite  of  his 
victim,  had  snapped  off  this  arm  then  grabbed  a  second 
time  before  swallowing  the  first.  Thus  in  murdering  the 
man  it  committed  suicide,  the  ragged  end  of  the  humerus 
boring  through  to  tell  the  tale  that  it  had  stuck  athwart 
the  gullet  and  worked  right  out.  "  King  over  all  the 
children  of  pride  "  as  it  is,  little  did  the  old  fisherman 
guess  what  a  grisly  pun  he  made  of  the  crocodile's  name 
by  dubbing  them  "  the  Undertakers"  (  Vakoka  Panshi). 

But  to  return  to  our  mighty  Jumbo. 

Mere  beefy  bulk,  though,  is  nothing  in  forest  prowess, 
and  this  same  ponderous  elephant  positively  trembles  at 
the  thought  of  a  tiny  leech.  And  no  wonder,  for  many 
an  elephant  dies  an  awful  death  from  a  leech  sucking  the 
inner  membrane  of  his  trunk  until  the  monstrous  tusker  is 
maddened  to  death.  Goaded  to  its  doom  by  a  tiny  leech, 
like  a  locomotive  thundering  down  the  line,  off"  this  six 
tons  of  madness  rushes  at  fifteen  miles  per  hour — "  Any- 
where, anywhere,  out  of  the  world  ! "  You  can  come 
across  a  huge  clearing  in  the  grass,  where  the  writhing 


436 


THINKING  BLACK 


giant  has  nearly  beaten  his  own  brains  out,  the  agony  all 
centred  in  that  finest  and  most  delicate  of  all  his  organs, 
the  "  marconigram "  trun,k.  Yes,  one  tiny  leech  can 
puncture  that  huge  balloon  of  beef,  the  vulnerable  point 
this  vaunted  trunk.  On  Lake  Mweru  this  is  called  "  the 
leech  doom,"  and  is  the  cause  of  that  curious  ceremony 
all  elephants  perform  when  they  come  across  drinking- 
water.  This  function  is  called  "  the  benediction"  (Kupara), 
and  the  elephant  passes  a  scared,  wistful  gaze  over  the 
sheet  of  water,  at  the  same  time  waving  his  trunk  like  a 
mesmerist  again  and  again  over  the  solemn,  treacherous 
pond.  But  the  trunk,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  no  magician's 
wand,  but  the  supreme  headquarters  of  Jumbo's  cunning, 
and  supplying  him  with,  not  so  much  a  sixth  sense  as  a 
sensorium  commune.  Instead  of  "praying"  a  sort  of 
grace-before-meat  kind  of  petition,  as  the  native  suggests, 
he  is  really  wringing  from  the  water  the  "  leech  secret." 
Certainly  the  merest  soupgon  of  leech-treachery  is  enough, 
and  with  one  trumpet-roar  the  idea  of  disgust  is  so  strong 
that  it  gives  him  momentum  for  a  fifteen-mile  run.  Is 
this  the  reason  why  an  elephant  has  been  endowed  with  a 
trunk?  I  mean,  if  clear  water  is  so  needful  to  Jumbo, 
then  does  not  this  very  length  of  trunk  permit  him  to 
drink  from  the  bank  without  entering  the  water  and 
thereby  stirring  up  the  muddy  sediment  ? 

(Later.) 

Again  I  say,  Bravo  !  for  the  men  who  risk  life  and  limb 
following  them  up.  The  average  African  hunter  is  a 
stalwart  who  works  hard,  walks  far,  and  is  named  "  friend 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  437 

of  the  forest."  What  splendid  evangelists  these  wandering 
Nimrods  make  !  Take  an  instance.  An  elephaut-hunter 
gets  soundly  and  profoundly  saved,  so  at  once  God  claims 
his  witness  far  afield.  His  elephants,  of  course,  claim  his 
presence  out  there  too.  Away  beyond  the  edge  of 
cultivation  he  goes,  following  up  the  spoor  of  his  elephants  ; 
dipping  down  into  gorges,  skirting  precipices,  sinking  into 
bulrush  bogs — 

"To  preach  as  never  sure  to  preach  again, 
And  as  a  dying  man  to  dying  men." 

Then  he  comes  back  to  tell  us  all  about  it  at  our 
Saturday  night  prayer-meeting,  a  weird  tale  of  the  lonely 
bush  and  the  stately  goings  of  our  God.  It  would  test 
the  most  skilled  in  mental  acrobatics  to  explain  away 
such  personal  intervention  of  Almighty  God  to  and  for 
that  hunter  of  His.  "What  will  prayer  do  for  you?" 
laugh  his  old  hunter  chums.  "All  that  God  can  do  for 
me,"  is  the  royal  reply.  The  misses  as  well  as  the 
hits  are  all  reported  as  occasions  for  praise.  And  his 
favourite  Bible  proof  is  that  "  the  Lord  preserveth  man 
and  beast."  Listen  to  his  quaint  exegesis — ^eserveth  the 
man  when  He  grants  a  hit,  preserveth  the  beast  when  He 
grants  a  miss  !  That  is  to  say,  locked  up  in  the  custody 
of  this  one  verse  you  have  all  the  fates  and  fortunes  of  the 
hunter  and  his  prey  :  God  for  the  man,  yet  God  for  the 
beast — yea,  God  all  and  in  all. 

But  one  flash  reveals  the  diamond.  And  this  exhorter 
in  the  prayer-meeting  soon  gets  to  close  quarters  with  his 


438  THINKING  BLACK 

younger  brethren,  the  local  preachers.  "  You  think," 
says  he,  "  that  this  preaching  in  your  own  suburbs  is 
evangelising  Africa  (a  mere  radius  of  a  few  miles) ;  but 
in  my  wanderings  I  come  upon  an  Africa  you  know  not — 
lost  villages  in  the  far  bush,  groups  of  towns  that  never 
saw  the  map.  Oh,  my  elephants  lead  me  to  strange 
corners  and  among  stranger  folk.  They  lead  the  way 
and  I  must  follow  ;  and  sometimes,  lying  across  our  track 
ahead,  we  see  shafts  of  ruddy  light  shooting  up,  and  here 
we  are  on  a  long-lost  villasje.  Once  in  olden  times  it  was 
fabled  that  they  had  a  visit  from  a  Northern  tribe,  but 
since  then  they  have  lived  and  died  lost  in  the  bush.  So 
what  do  I  do  ?  I  let  my  herd  of  elephants  escape,  and 
stay  with  these  scared-of-eye  Africans — did  not  God  lead 
me  to  them  ?  And  if  God's  way  is  our  way,  will  not  His 
joy  be  our  joy  ?  " 

He  has  lost  his  elephants  owing  to  this  intercepting 
town — 

"  But  all  through  the  mountains,  thunder-riven, 

And  up  from  the  rocky  steep, 
There  arose  a  cry  to  the  gates  of  Heaven  : 

'  Rejoice  !    I  have  found  My  sheep  ! 
And  the  angels  echoed,  around  the  throne, 
'  Rejoice  !    For  the  Lord  brings  back  His  own  ! ' " 

Thus  he  tells  his  tale.  His  profession  is  elephants, 
but  his  confession  is  Christ.  And  who  would  compare 
profession  with  confession — what  are  literal  elephants  to 
spiritual  sheep  ?  Not  once  but  several  times  has  he 
broken  in  on  such  old-world  folks — a  true  Mission  to  the 
lost,  far  truer  than  many  a  high-sounding  enterprise  born 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  439 


in  a  committee-room  or  baptized  on  a  platform.  Watch 
him,  this  apostle  of  the  Nimrod  cult.  A  veteran  of  life's 
battles  with  a  war-worn  face,  there  he  stands  in  his  plain 
loin-cloth,  the  very  plainness  of  the  old  hunter  being  a 
plainer  rebuke  to  the  young  generation  of  over-dressed 
Christians.  He  adorns  the  doctrine,  and  they  are  too 
apt  to  adorn  themselves.  A  mighty  hunter  before  the 
Lord. 

As  we  have  already  seen,  of  course  one  swallow  does 
not  make  a  summer  in  Africa.  But  (if  one  dare  execute 
such  a  straddle  on  cross  metaphors)  here  is  a  straw  that 
indicates  the  current  among  the  cannibals.  I  refer  to  a 
curiously  foreign  feature  of  life  in  here,  a  great  tribal 
meeting  on  sanitation  summoned  by  the  deep-voiced 
Nkumji,  or  sycamore-drum,  the  Chief  taking  his  seat  by 
my  side  and  seconding  everything.  Being  thirsty,  I 
proposed  to  indulge  my  baser  nature  with  a  cup  of  water, 
but  found  it  filthy  with  contamination.  If  "  Afric's 
sunny  fountains "  would  only  roll  down  water  instead  of 
sand  at  times,  it  would  be  a  decided  improvement. 
"  Golden  sands "  sounds  poetic,  but  in  Africa  we  must 
get  all  our  poetry  out  of  the  plain  prose  of  life,  and  this 
trek  I  have  drunk  red  water  and  black  water,  yellow 
water  and  white  water,  but  worst  of  all  was  this  green 
stuff  to-day.  Ah  yes!  I  believe  in  "holy  water" 
provided  it  is  of  the  right  kind.  Pushing  investigations, 
we  soon  find  out  that  here  is  a  vast  tribe  living  on  a 
dunghill  of  disease,  the  whole  insanitary  condition  of 
the  place  a  clear  case  of  ten  thousand  dirty  men  shaking 


440 


THINKING  BLACK 


their  dirty  fists  in  Nature's  face.  "  Dirt-cheap,"  as  a 
phrase,  may  be  excellent  English,  but  here  in  Lubaland 
dirt  is  not  cheap,  oh  no,  but  costly,  disease-gendering  and 
deadly,  in  fact.  Hence  this  curious  innovation — a  lecture 
on  sanitation.  Here  they  gather,  massed  in  their  thousands, 
my  business  being  to  pulverise  prejudices.  It  turns  out 
a  famous  gathering  they  will  never  forget,  that  seething 
black  cloud  melted  from  the  distrust  of  an  attack  on  old 
heathen  ways  of  life  to  excited  acquiescence  when  the 
thing  was  taken  right  out  of  our  hands  and  made  law. 
Shot  after  shot  rang  into  the  hill  behind  the  town 
by  way  of  ratification,  and  towards  the  end  I  darted  in 
with — Christ  crucified.  They  are  utterly  delighted  to 
know  that  tve,  in  the  night  of  the  Druids  and  later,  were 
as  bad  as  they.  It  was  very  good  of  them  to  let  me 
down  so  softly,  for  my  sanitary  address  was  more  poignant 
than  polite.  In  order  to  convey  the  truth  with  entire 
fidelity,  I  had,  in  fact,  dredged  the  dictionary  for 
adjectives  with  some  sting  in  them.  Besides,  we  must 
remember  that  these  dirty  doings  of  theirs  all  enshrine 
great  traditions,  and  I  was  really  combating  prejudices 
of  a  most  bristly  kind.  However,  at  glad  last,  a  ray  of 
intelligence  actually  pierced  the  mists  of  the  cannibal 
brain,  and  the  whole  mob  caught  at  the  extremely 
elementary  idea  that  there  is  a  weak  futility  in  poisoning 
yourself  with  filth.  Yet  once  again  I  admit  that 
Aristotle  was  right,  and  that  this  one  swallow  does  not 
make  a  summer  in  Africa. 

Of  course,  crooked  Nature  has  likewise  trapped  the 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  441 

Mweru  negro  into  very  crooked  sanitation — the  old 
story  of  the  negro  debasing  his  surroundings  and  the 
surroundings  taking  revenge  by  debasing  the  negro.  A 
hundred  huts  packed  together  means  that  a  smothered 
incipient  cough  beginning  away  at  the  corner  of  the 
hamlet  is,  in  a  few  days,  heard  infectiously  cough,  cough- 
ing its  way  round  the  beehive  town.  But  if  so  with  an 
elementary  cough,  how  about  the  infectional  terrors  of 
sleeping  sickness  ?  In  Lubaland,  as  I  now  write,  whole 
towns  are  being  wiped  off  the  map — the  Nodder  they 
call  that  disease.  So,  too,  smallpox  licks  up  a  whole 
population,  the  disease  sweeping  through  the  land  like 
the  annual  grass-fires.  Here,  then,  we  see  them  crowding 
and  verminating  in  their  filth.  Living  in  crowds  they 
must  die  in  crowds,  like  the  flock  of  five  duck  you  can 
shoot  with  one  cartridge  from  that  same  stockade.  For 
the  Luban  duck  are  like  the  adjacent  smallpox  Africans, 
they  stupidly  flock  thickly,  a  half-dozen  easily  falling  to 
one  shot.  In  Lubaland  one  burning  arrow  silently  fired 
into  that  grass  village  did  literally  burn  the  whole  of 
the  mushroom  edifices  out  of  existence — a  perfect  type 
this  of  what  inflammable  diseases  do  all  over  our  weary, 
Christless  land. 

Such,  then,  is  the  precious  price  they  pay  for  the 
plan  of  higgledy-piggledy.  For  the  crooked  ways  of  the 
crooked  negro  have  not  yet  been  exhausted,  and  long  ago 
it  must  have  been  obvious  to  the  most  superficial  reader 
that  this  crooked  sanitation  must  also  breed  a  crooked 
set  of  morals.    Laugh  at  tlie  Missionary  as  the  modern 


442 


THINKING  BLACK 


traveller  must,  we  dare  not  hide  the  fact  that  the  soul 
of  all  improvement  is  the  improvement  of  the  soul.  The 
infectious  cough  going  round  the  town  is  only  the  type 
of  the  infectious  immoral  gossip — there  is  no  secret 
hidden  in  that  whole  grass  town.  The  hundred  huts  are 
only  a  whispering  gallery,  and  what  is  told  in  the  Bantu 
ear  is  made  known  on  the  Bantu  housetops.  Mere  bairns 
are  corrupt  and  tainted  at  the  cradle,  life  has  no  more 
secrets  for  them.  Preach  against  it,  and  they  only  poke 
the  proverb  at  you,  "  What  baby  lion  ever  trembled  at 
his  father's  roaring  ? "  Pour  out  on  them  your  most 
withering  scorn,  and  they  nag  you  thus  :  "If  the  tree  has 
grown  up  crooked  it  is  because  no  one  straightened  it 
when  young."  Thus  the  negro  river  of  morals  is  fouled  at 
its  own  fount ;  the  said  fount  being,  so  to  speak,  not  a  cool 
mountain  spring  high  up  in  the  clouds,  but  rather  one 
of  their  own  hot  springs  hiccuping  down  in  the  sweltering 
plains.  Even  the  Missionary  who  makes  a  clutch  at 
these  waifs  being  swept  past  in  the  current  of  sin  can 
only  give  them  two  hours  or  so  of  corrective  school 
training ;  but,  alas,  against  these  few  and  fugitive  hours 
in  the  day  you  have  the  retrograde  lapse  of  twenty-two 
hours  into  heathen  hovel-life.  Think  of  a  whole  heathen 
family  packed  like  pigs  in  one  tiny  little  beehive  hut ! 
Still  clinging  to  forest  figures  of  speech,  they  call  these 
tots  of  theirs  Tunsaala,  or  twigs,  elders  by  parity  of 
reasoning  being  big  branches  on  the  tribal  tree — a  happy 
Missionary  metaphor  this  to  encourage  any  one  working 
in  Africa  among  the  young.    "  For,"  say  they,  "  how  do 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  443 


you  set  the  camp  logs  blazing  in  the  forest  if  not  by  first 
of  all  coaxing  a  few  tiny  twigs  to  catch  fire,  the  six-feet- 
long  logs  soon  flaming  furiously  from  this  humble  initial 
ignition  ? "  N.  B. :  The  young  teach  the  old,  the  twigs 
lead  up  to  the  branches,  and  the  chips  of  the  old  blocks 
will  send  the  said  old  blocks  blazing.  It's  coming,  oh,  it's 
coming  ! 

This  packing  of  the  domicile  into  one  den,  remember, 
is  only  an  enlarged  photo  of  the  domicile  packing  itself 
with  mush  at  supper-time.  The  same  family  who  crowd 
each  other  out  in  one  tiny  hut  is  likewise  seen  crowding 
round  one  tiny  pot,  the  big  paws  and  the  little  paws  all 
digging  into  the  thick  porridge  in  the  same  ratio  as  a 
soup-ladle  and  a  salt-spoon.  The  negro  argues  that  God, 
in  perfect  design,  has  dieted  mankind  according  to  the 
divine  gradation  in  the  size  of  human  hands.  Baby 
cannot  eat  too  big  spoonfuls  if  he  uses  his  own  little  fists  : 
"Little  meat  gives  little  sauce"  is  the  native  apology  on 
this  score.  There  is  probably  a  moral  in  all  this  peculiarly 
pertinent  to  our  poor  prayers,  to  wit,  what  God  gives  us 
is  better  than  what  we  can  take.  A  Luban  child  asks 
her  aunt  for  some  pea-nuts.  "Take  a  handful,"  says  the 
elder.  "  You  give  me  a  handful,  auntie ;  your  hand  is 
bigger " — to  which  we  say,  Bravo !  for  little  Miss  Salt- 
spoon,  who  scores  an  easy  first  against  Mrs.  Soup-ladle. 
Here,  then,  once  again,  you  have  a  fruitful  source  of 
disease — a  common  pot  with  a  dozen  fists  of  varying 
degrees  of  cleanliness  all  putting  the  public  health  in 

jeopardy.    Like  the  little  beehive  roof  of  his  hut,  with 
27 


444 


THINKING  BLACK 


all  the  matchwood  rafters  shooting  up  and  converging 
into  one  apex,  so,  and  much  worse  so,  with  these  human 
hand-ladles  and  spoons,  all  shooting  into  the  centre  of 
gravity,  all  digging  out  from  the  mass  of  mush  their 
voracious  supper.  Speaking  is  taboo  at  this  sacred 
season.  "Table-talk"  is  only  the  happy  lot  of  other 
lands  who  boast  of  tables,  but  Mr.  African  dines  on 
the  earth  that  boasts  of  seed-time  and  harvest,  and  in 
the  first  instance  gave  them  that  bountiful  meal.  But 
the  high  crime  and  misdemeanour  of  the  town  is  to  dine 
alone — their  very  word  "  criminal "  has  this  meaning, 
"  Mr.  Eat-alone."  Such  a  one  is  a  thief  and  has  gone 
over  to  the  wild  beasts.  For  the  notion  of  people 
assembling  in  order  to  absorb  food  is  certainly  not  a 
natural  idea :  the  lower  animals  never  invite  each  other 
to  dinner — on  the  contrary. 

Here,  then,  is  Africa's  challenge  to  its  Missionaries. 
Will  they  allow  a  whole  continent  to  live  like  beasts  in 
such  hovels,  millions  of  negroes  cribbed,  cabined,  and 
confined  in  dens  of  disease  ?  No  doubt  it  is  our  diurnal 
duty  to  preach  that  the  soul  of  all  improvement  is  the 
improvement  of  the  soul.  But  God's  equilateral  triangle 
of  body,  soul,  and  spirit  must  never  be  ignored.  Is  not 
the  body  wholly  ensouled,  and  is  not  the  soul  wholly 
embodied  ?  Too  often  in  Missionary  literature  the  writer 
talks  about  these  "  humble  abodes  "  of  his  black  parish- 
ioners, whereas  the  real  phrasing  of  the  matter  is  that  they 
are  more  humbling  than  humble.  The  more  grandiose 
our  Mission  stations,  the  more  striking  and  impossible  the 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  445 

native  huts.  The  louder,  too,  the  call  to  gut  out  these 
clotted  masses  of  tropical  slums.  Ignore  this  as  Africa's 
burning  question,  and  you  commit  the  sad  old  folly  of 
the  Middle  Ages — I  mean  when  the  Church  built  big 
cathedrals  and  men  lived  in  hovels.  Ever  since  those 
days  back  in  Bihe  when  I  lived  with  Mr.  Negro  chez  lui, 
I  have  a  plan  simmering  in  my  mind,  a  plan  that  involves 
long  one-street  villages  lined  out  for  miles.  The  thing 
can  be  done,  and  we  Missionaries  should  do  it.  Oh  yes, 
we  are  here  for  souls,  but — I  repeat  it — the  negro  soul  is 
as  wholly  embodied  as  the  negro  body  is  wholly  ensouled. 
In  other  words,  in  Africa  the  only  true  fulfilling  of  your 
heavenly  calling  is  the  doing  of  earthly  things  in  a 
heavenly  manner. 

{Later.) 

Penning,  as  I  do,  these  lines  long  years  after, 
here  on  my  table  is  a  measuring- tape  that  witnesses  the 
success  of  this  idea.  That  tape  has  helped  to  line  out  six 
miles  of  street  frontage  along  our  tangled  Mweru.  A 
whole  tribe  pluming  itself  on  its  dirty  dens  actually, 
en  masse,  took  the  idea  up,  burned  its  old  huts  and  built 
long  one-street  hamlets  along  the  edge  of  the  cliff.  Even 
the  preposterous  Lubans  caught  the  idea  of  the  thing, 
and  tlie  last  developments  in  1909  are  a  wonder.  Writing 
on  the  spot,  let  me  tell  what  happened.  I  am  off  these 
three  weeks  at  a  Luban  town,  living  with  a  neirro  in 
his  own  mud  hut ;  we  go  halves  with  the  domicile  and 
are  in  close  touch.  Just  one  year  ago  I  had  a  rousing 
time  here,  then  passed  on,  anil  seemingly  after  long  years 


446 


THINKING  BLACK 


things  have  come  to  a  head  at  last.  Found  them,  as 
a  township,  a  dark  mass  of  dilapidated  huts,  and  the 
problem  was  how  to  get  -them  out  of  that  hole  and  give 
them  a  fresh  start.  That  was  a  year  ago.  Now  all  is  so 
changed  that  "  marvellous  "  is  the  true  adjective  qualifying 
the  truest  of  nouns — change.  After  many  years'  tentative 
work  in  Africa,  there  seems  (from  a  letter  before  me)  a 
serious  concession  that  it  has  been  largely  along  wrong 
lines.  The  error  lay  in  training  exotic  carpenters  and 
joiners,  who  at  once  deserted  their  own  tribe  and  went 
far  ahead,  to  return  never,  never  more.  The  clamant 
need  is  confronting  the  tribe  as  a  whole,  and  "housing" 
it  along  sane,  simple  lines — two-  or  three-roomed  cottages, 
that  is  to  say. 

To  get  a  whole  town  so  to  arise  after  the  sleep  of 
centuries  is  a  very  thrilling  thing ;  there  is  a  quiver  in 
the  air,  and  you  feel  in  a  very  true  manner  you  are  getting 
nearer  the  root  of  things.  They  do  it  all,  their  own 
houses  built  by  and  for  themselves.  Then  away  at  the 
end  of  this  new  town  of  theirs,  you  can  see  the  roof  of 
the  Bible-school,  the  point  this  where  we  link  up  the 
spiritual  with  the  temporal.  Man  can  see  to  the  housing 
of  a  town,  but  God  alone  can  see  to  the  homing  of  it. 
And,  remember,  in  the  old  dens  of  darkness  the  fount  of 
life  was  poisoned  :  no  home,  no  holy  felicities  of  life — a 
human  pigsty.  The  children  of  these  holes  we  daily 
clutched  at  as  they  were  daily  swept  past  us,  but  the 
Mission  school  only  has  them  for  two  hours,  as  against 
the  long  reactionary  remainder  of  the  day  (and  night !)  in 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  447 


heathendom.  Hence  this  happy  solution  in  the  housing 
of  the  people,  with  the  hope  that  God  will  "home"  the 
people  we  have  "housed." 

Of  course  in  fighting  filth  of  this  sort  you  must  be 
ruthlessly  efficient,  and  one  old  man  even  took  the  field 
and  defended  my  action  when  I  could  scarcely  do  so 
myself.  Kinder  to  me  than  I  could  be  to  myself,  he, 
referring  to  the  breaking  with  many  a  past  custom,  said, 
"How  can  you  enter  through  an  old  abandoned  door- 
way without  first  breaking  the  many  cobwebs  blocking 
entrance  ? "  A  concession  this — and  from  a  very  old  high- 
and-dry  Tory — that  their  ancient  ideas  were  cobwebs, 
nothing  more.  And  here  is  my  reward  this  trip,  for  I  am 
now  living  with  a  raw  Luban  in  his  own  three-roomed 
house  :  mark  you,  in  his  house,  when  a  year  ago  you 
could  not  have  slept  in  his  town,  the  pestiferous  hole 
being  nigh  mortal. 

These  lines  are  penned  to  the  flicker  of  a  tiny  lamp 
burning  linseed  oil :  not  true  linseed,  really  sesame,  and 
not  a  bad  light.  This  oil  is  grown  for  us  by  the  Lubans  : 
a  new  crop  is  just  being  planted,  and  these  oil-growers 
speak  about  "  growing  "  our  light  for  us.  Thus  literally 
"  light  is  sown  for  the  righteous."  Who  ever  heard  of 
the  Israelites  having  mineral  oil  ?  Obviously  it  must 
have  been  sown ;  and  Christ  the  Light  was  sown  in 
sorrow  too. 

But  what  about  tools  ?  you  ask.  Talk  about 
economising  your  hardware — here  is  a  snapshot  I  saw 
to-day,  eloquent  of  the  penury  of  centuries.    The  negro 


U8  THINKING  BLACK 

— one  of  the  illustrious  family  named  "  Smith " — was 
squatted  under  a  tall  clump  of  millet  thirteen  feet  high, 
two  old  worn-out  garden-hoes  in  his  hand.  Mere  "  scrap- 
heap  "  iron  now,  they  had  done  the  season's  farming  for 
him :  witness  the  waving  millet  in  the  background. 
"  Now,"  quoth  the  negro  endearingly  to  his  broken  scraps 
of  hoes,  "  you  have  made  unto  me  a  harvest,  and,  go  to  ! 
let  us  make  an  axe  to  build  a  house  wherein  to  dwell." 
So,  sure  enough,  the  transformation  is  soon  going  on 
apace.  First  of  all  he  manipulates  two  antelope-skins  into 
a  bellows,  and  then  (dressed  in  skins  himself)  he  starts  to 
blow  as  loud  as  his  bellows.  Then  comes  the  funny 
business  of  a  funnel  for  his  blast  furnace  ;  this  moulded 
out  of  mother  earth  like  the  blacksmith  himself.  Then 
we  reach  the  item  of  coals — a  heap  of  red  iron-wood 
reduced  to  charcoal,  which  he  soon  pufF-pufFs  into  a  blaze. 
And  lo,  the  fire  being  now  as  red  as  it  is  ready,  this  son 
of  Tubal  Cain  throws  his  two  bits  of  hoes  into  the  furnace 
and  grips  his  hammer.  But  what  is  this  hammer?  A 
nice  round  stone.  And  what  the  anvil  ?  The  hammer's 
own  cousin — another  block  of  stone.  There  are  tongs, 
too — five,  six,  or  seven  strips  of  thick  green  bark  all  at 
hand,  bark  that  bends  at  will  into  any  shape  of  tongs  he 
desires.  The  very  greenness  of  these  bark  tongs  is  their 
major  value,  for  when,  in  welding,  they  bite  the  glowing 
iron,  instead  of  burning  like  a  match  these  tongs  simply 
spit  out  their  native  juice,  so  that  each  pair  of  tongs  can 
bite  the  red  iron  three  times  before  ignition.  "  Fighting 
flame "  is  what  this  Smith-by-name  and  Smith-by-trade 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  449 


negro  thinks  he  is  doing,  and  the  paradox  of  his  poverty 
is  that  he  can  always  boast  a  wealth  of  these  stone-age 
anvils,  hammers,  and  tongs,  the  very  iron  having  been 
dug  out  of  the  earth  as  a  stone. 

Thus  he  whirls  round  in  his  circle  of  existence,  exactly 
like  the  earth  he  dwells  on.  For  the  earth  opened  to 
yield  the  iron — that  made  the  ore — that  made  the  field  of 
grain — that  made  strong  the  man — that  made  and  unmade 
the  hoe — that  made  the  axe — that  made  the  cool  cottage 
in  which  he  dwells  :  verily,  this  is  the-house-that-Jack- 
built.  Why  wonder  that  this  model  black  strokes  himself 
down  with  complacency  in  the  borrowed  words:  "Take 
us  all,  professions  and  trades  together,  and  you  will  find 
by  actual  measurement  round  the  head  and  round  the 
chest,  and  round  our  manners  and  characters,  if  you  like, 
that  we  blacksmiths  are  the  only  genuine  aristocracy  at 
present  in  existence  "  ? 

More  about  polygamy.  Things  certainly  get  "  curi- 
ouser  and  curiouser,"  as  Alice  had  occasion  to  remark 
in  her  travels  in  Wonderland.  Among  the  Lubans  man  is 
reckoned  such' a  frigid  monster  that  a  woman  is  graciously 
permitted  to  cook  his  meal,  but  may  not  eat  of  same. 
She  is  caught  in  a  cobweb  of  Mbala  laws  and  by-laws,  a 
stringent  point  being  that  she  cannot  even  speak  during 
the  whole  period  of  cooking  and  consumption  of  food. 
Only  after  her  giant  is  refreshed  is  this  "  covenant  of 
silence"  formally  annulled  by  the  breaking  of  a  stick 
or  straw  into  three  fragments,  each  fragment  kissed  by 
the  lady  as  she  throws  it  away,  and  then  the  remaining 


450 


THINKING  BLACK 


third  bit  is  broken  between  them.  Sequel :  three 
pretences  of  shaking  hands,  the  fingers  not  meeting, 
however.  And  all  this  mummery  at  food  for  ever  and 
a  day,  and  after  every  meal,  the  man  receiving  his 
homage  with  a  smug  complacency.  This  kissing  of  the 
fragments  of  stick  by  the  lady-love  is,  of  course,  the 
only  kissing  known  in  the  tribe,  for  one  of  their  bits 
of  banter  against  the  white  race  is  that  they  "  lick  each 
other"  as  a  greeting.  The  same  woman  this  who  has 
built  her  own  house,  including  even  the  final  touches 
of  furnishing ;  the  firewood  and  pots  all  her  own  finding 
too.  Let  a  Missionary  pitch  his  tent  in  this  town 
and  soon  swarms  of  these  ladies  seek  his  serious 
opinion  anent  their  crooked  conjugal  relations.  These 
ladies  suffer  manifest  distress  and  keep  buzzing  round 
like  a  swarm  of  bees ;  snip-snap  for  hours,  the  African 
women  beating  the  men  at  putting  posers.  Now  it  is 
one  understands  why,  in  the  only  negro  lady's  con- 
versation contained  in  Scripture,  it  should  be  noted  that 
she  asked  (even  !)  Solomon  "  hard  questions."  From  the 
days  of  Sheba's  queen  they  are  all  alike  pouring  out 
puzzle-speech  the  livelong  day.  Wave  them  off",  beseech 
them  to  stop,  implore  them  to  change  the  subject :  oh 
no,  all  their  gabble  is  concerning  the  holy  estate.  My 
rule  is  to  tell  all  such  unblushingly  that  the  woman 
who  wants  her  husband  to  be  different  generally  wants 
a  different  husband.  Very  often,  though,  the  men  are 
brutes  and  to  blame. 

The  usual  story  is  that  the  plaintiff"  is  Mrs.  No.  1, 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  451 


that  she  married  him  long  ago  when  the  work!  was 
younger  and  he  and  she  at  the  mating  age.  Then 
came  Mrs.  No.  2  ;  a  pause,  then  Mrs.  No.  3  intrudes 
on  the  friendship  of  Mesdames  Nos.  1  and  2.  Accord- 
ing to  this  lady,  it  seems  a  mistake  to  say  it  takes 
two  to  make  a  quarrel,  for  here  you  have  a  woman 
arguing  that  two  wives  for  one  husband  would  be 
passable.  What  she  does  declare  to  be  deadly  is  this 
terrible  triangle,  for  just  as  it  takes  three  straight  lines 
to  enclose  a  space,  so  seemingly  it  takes  three  wrangling 
wives  to  make  a  quarrel.  At  any  rate,  soon  enough, 
the  husband's  snappish  retorts  tell  No.  1  the  tale  that 
she  has  been  superseded — yes — she  who  for  so  long 
took  hungrily  the  crumbs  of  affection  that  fell  from 
his  table.  The  upshot  of  all  this  matrimonial  muddle 
seems  to  be  that  ideal  wedlock  is  considered  only  a  solid 
bread-and-butter  arrangement,  and  the  best  cook  wins 
the  worst  of  husbands.  No  royal  glance  of  love  ever  (?) 
flashed  from  mate  to  mate,  and  the  woman  who  ousts 
another  woman  only  does  so  in  order  to  enslave  herself 
Yet  for  centuries  this  has  gone  on,  a  concubine  cook 
exerting  all  her  blandishments  to  win  a  man's  stomach, 
not  his  heart.  Is  this  the  reason  why  the  word  for 
stomach  (Munda)  is  the  same  as  for  "Iieart"?  No 
simple  fireside  virtues  in  demand  here.  Cook,  only 
cook,  and  soon  enough  they  find  that  the  love  that 
has  ends,  quickly  has  an  end. 

But  there  are  more  horrors  here,  and  all  suggestive 
of  this  land  of  uncounted  tears.    Between  me  and  my 


452 


THINKIiYG  BLACK 


night's  rest,  lo,  a  heart-broken  little  girl  weeping  her 
eyes  out  in  the  long  grass.  The  spot  is  tangled,  and 
there  is  a  rough  overgrown  heap — her  mother's  grave. 
This  orphan  is  seven  years  of  age,  and  in  the  adjacent 
village  she  was  belaboured  with  blows  to  force  her  to 
marry  an  old  negro  rake.  So,  with  tear-soaked  face, 
away  she  darts  from  the  dwellings  of  men,  out,  away 
out  to  her  mother's  grave  in  the  bush,  one  moan  and 
one  only :  "  Oh,  mother,  why  did  you  leave  me  out 
here  in  the  land  of  perplexities  ? "  [Pano  pa  kanshia). 
This  led  to  a  stormy  encounter  with  the  old  roue,  and 
if  anger  be  "a  punishing  of  oneself  for  the  fault  of 
another,"  then  was  I  sorely  punished.  Without  any 
beat-about-the-bush  circumlocution,  here  you  have  the 
darkest  smudge  in  a  dark  history — the  baby-brides  of 
Africa.  Here  is  a  curse  that  must  be  faced  and  fought, 
all  the  angels  of  God  fighting  for  you.  Yet  they  can 
argue  even  this.  Trying  to  talk  me  out  of  my 
abhorrence,  they  insist  that  "  baby -betrothal "  is  only  their 
tribal  system  of  "  Life  Insurance,"  the  idea  being  that 
if  the  child  comes  to  an  untimely  end  then  the  husband 
must  pay  the  insurance  money.  But  they  forget  to 
say  that  "  Mutual  Insurance "  is  the  real  idea,  and  this 
cuts  both  ways,  the  child  having  to  pay  for  her  old 
husband's  demise.  Here,  then,  is  a  so-called  Insurance 
really  ensuring  one  thing — the  misery  of  the  tiny 
widow. 

Our  Sera  neighbours  over  the  liill  are  a  bad  lot. 
There  I  found  more  people  buried  alive.    But  is  this  kind 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  453 

of  thing  really  authentic  ?  The  answer  is  that  the  best 
sort  of  African  proof  is  always  that  genuine  thing  you 
yourself  stumble  over  in  the  grass,  accidentally.  Here  is 
an  instance.  Down  in  the  Sera  plain  I  put  up  for  the 
night  in  a  random  hamlet  on  the  edge  of  the  bulrush-bog. 
At  sundown  here  come  a  crowd  of  merry  bairns  round 
me,  as  happy  with  their  white  visitor  as  a  cat  in  the 
fender.  But  now  for  a  change  of  metaphor.  Then  they 
begin  to  prattle  like  starlings,  putting  many  a  poser  to 
poor  me,  big  questions  from  little  folks  —  why  not  ? 
Should  not  a  bigr  horse  take  a  big  fence  ?  Next  we 
exchange  names  as  per  Lubau  courtesy.  The  first  little 
girl  of  my  gossip  is  much  more  strikingly  well  dressed 
than  all  the  crowd,  so  much  that  one  opines  she  is  a 
personality,  the  local  magnate's  daughter  perhaps.  But 
when  I  ])robe  inquisitively  about  her  nice  beads,  nicer 
calico,  and  fantastic  hair-coiffure,  it  soon  begins  to  dawn 
on  me  that  this  really  harmless  interlocutor  is  painfully 
embarrassing.  Had  village  elders  been  around,  of  course, 
I  would  never  have  got  wind  of  that  tragedy  at  all,  but 
here  are  a  dozen  precocious  little  chatterers  telling  me 
the  tale.  Describing,  if  you  please,  most  graphically  how 
they  killed  this  little  mode  de  Paris  girl's  mother  at  the 
last  funeral.  That  she  is  no  Cliief's  daughter  at  all  at 
all ;  and  that,  in  fact,  she  has  only  been  paid  so  much 
"  hush-money "  for  her  mother's  death,  witness  these 
blue  Ijeads  and  fancy  calico.  Mother  had  gone  on  the 
long,  lonely  journey  with  the  Chief,  who  had  always  an 
escort  in  life,  and  must  not  be  deprived  of  one  in  death. 


454 


THINKING  BLACK 


the  orphan  child  receiving  "  solatium  and  damages  "  for 
her  mother's  sacrificial  death.  She  herself,  though,  would 
grow  up,  only  to  be  one  day  fuel  for  the  same  fire.  So 
much  for  the  tell-tale  vouchers  you  stumble  over  among 
the  villages,  and  the  next  best  criterion  is  the  thing  you 
overhear  in  Africa.  Remember,  the  "  Socratic  method" 
of  fishing  for  facts,  by  questions,  is  Africa's  greatest  peril : 
is  not  an  African  only  an  echo  of  his  querist  ?  (Besides 
— oh,  pitfall  for  the  unwary — unless  you  conjugate  your 
verb  of  interrogation  in  the  subjunctive  mood,  you  don't 
ask  a  question,  hut  dictate  an  ansiver.)  On  the  7th 
January,  down  the  Lualaba,  I  overheard  and  jotted  down 
a  "  sacrifice  "  talk  going  on  :  the  white  man  is  supposed  to 
be  sleeping,  and  this  is  what  comes  over  his  shoulders. 
Chimunwa's  brother  stretched  out  his  lame  leg  to  his 
listeners,  then  tenderly  and  approvingly  patted  its  only 
four  toes.  Quoth  he  :  "  Ah,  you  may  laugh  at  '  Game- 
leg'  {Chilemakulu),  but  proud  am  I  to  have  only  four  toes." 
"  Why  ?  "  chorused  the  company  expectantly.  "  The  lack 
of  my  fifth  toe  on  my  left  foot,"  answered  he,  "  is  my 
life.    They  were  going  to  make  me  one  of  the  sacrifices 

at  's  funeral,  but  a  sacrifice  with  a  blemish  won't  do, 

so  I  got  off"  scot  free,"  The  point  again  made  in  that  talk 
was  that  as  in  life  the  dead  Chief  owned  the  country  and 
its  inhabitants,  it  was  obviously  absurd  to  think  he  should 
be  allowed  to  go  all  alone  on  the  "long  journey"  of 
death  without  company.  Then  came  a  snatch  of  pure 
Bantu  which  unconsciously  was  a  literal  quotation  from 
Isaiah  :  "  The  bed  is  shorter  than  a  man  can  lie  on  in  the 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  455 


world  of  the  dead."  This,  to  prove  the  loneliness  of  the 
tomb  and  the  need  for  company. 

To  press  again  for  the  reason  of  all  that  murder  is 
to  receive  this  time  a  utilitarian  explanation.  Piercing 
below  the  stratum  of  the  sacrificial  idea,  you  reach  that 
deepest  deep  in  human  nature,  the  law  of  self-preservation. 
It  is  only  the  African  Tsar's  plan  for  securing  himself 
immunity  from  the  anarchist's  bomb — merely  the  King's 
threat  that  if  they  kill  him,  then  in  revenge  he  will  die, 
dragging  many  down  with  him  to  the  grave.  Hence  the 
negro  song  of  warning — 

"  As  the  forest  trees  rock 

When  the  wild  winds  blow, 
The  King's  death  is  a  shock, 
For  how  bloody  the  woe ! " 

But  is  there  no  glint  of  sunshine  in  it  all  ?  Yes — and 
very  much  yes.  Life  is  full  of  contrasts  in  Africa,  and 
one  such  bloody  sacrifice  was  really  the  means  of  breaking 
a  bad  heart  of  adamant.  This  was  our  pioneer  elder  of 
the  Garenganze  church,  the  late  Smish,  who  was  an 
executioner  in  the  old  days.  Behold  him  hurrying  to 
her  premature  death  a  young  mother  with  her  babe,  when 
the  poor  doomed  woman  at  the  grave's  mouth  took  the 
baby  and,  forgetful  of  her  own  impending  death-pangs, 
sobbed  out,  "Oh,  deal  kindly  with  my  bairn!"  {Ikala 
viya  ne  Kana  Kami).  Smish  never  forgot  that  stab — 
I  mean  the  royal  glance  of  maternal  love  this  mother 
flashed  to  her  bairn  was  never  forgotten.  Poor  baby,  on 
being  torn  from  her,  did  not  know  how  he  stabbed  his 


456 


THINKING  BLACK 


dear  dying  mother  in  the  expostulating  cry,  "  Mama ! 
Mama  !  "  Years  after,  in  contrition  of  heart,  the  memory 
of  that  dying  sob  stabbed  his  soul,  and  when  he  heard  of 
Christ  praying  for  His  enemies  he  thought  likewise  of 
that  dying  woman's  prayer. 

Watch  how  we  conciliate  these  cut- throats.  Picture 
a  tall  hunter  of  powerful  build,  with  a  smile  that  would 
frighten  a  bull-dog.  But  when  his  tale  is  told,  it  is  a 
wonder  he  has  a  smile  at  all.  Have  not  two  years  dragged 
past  since  his  right  arm  was  torn  to  pieces  by  the  burst- 
ing of  his  old  "  five  feet  of  gas-pipe  "  gun  ?  The  story 
runs  that,  being  a  big  brave  black,  he  had  enough  of  the 
child  left  in  him  to  want  his  weapon  to  go  off  with  a  bang  ; 
so,  one  day  in  hunting,  he  loaded  up  inordinately,  the 
charge  of  powder  nearly  a  foot  deep  in  the  barrel.  Of 
course,  the  bang  that  should  have  flattened  the  elephant 
on  the  ground  burst  back  on  the  hunter,  and  the  biter 
was  bit.  Thus  began  the  twenty-four  dragging  months 
of  agony,  when  the  quacks  from  far  and  near  exploited 
the  gaping  wound  until  the  one  became  many.  At  last, 
we  come  on  the  scene,  and  the  problem  now  stands  how 
to  break  this  ring  of  rascals  and  cure  our  man.  Well, 
plucky  Mrs.  Crawford,  after  much  judicious  wheedling, 
finally  conciliated  the  whole  gang  of  kinsmen,  the  stoutest 
objector  being  the  man's  own  wife,  who  resentfully  sniffed 
a  very  gem  of  a  sniff  in  protest.  To  the  last,  this  good 
lady — one  of  the  well-meaning,  fussy  type — turned  up 
her  nose  at  the  idea  of  a  "  death-sleep  "  operation  ;  but 
this  turning  up  of  her  nose  was  not  to  be  wondered  at, 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  457 

for  the  said  snub-nose  is  naturally  adapted  for  that  pur- 
pose. Yet  was  she  a  kindly  little  body,  and  no  doubt  it 
was  out  of  genuine  affection  for  the  sufferer  she  resented 
the  terribly  business-like  look  of  the  table  and  gleaming 
instruments.  Just  as  a  peaceful  cat  dozing  in  the  sun- 
light becomes  a  thing  of  bristling  wickedness  and  fury 
when  an  enemy  comes  on  the  scene,  even  so  Mrs.  Hunter 
and  her  dislike  of  this  "death-sleep."  But,  at  last,  we 
won  her  round.  Result :  a  splendidly  successful  ampu- 
tation of  the  arm  by  my  pioneer  wife,  the  poor  hunter 
getting  the  first  moment  of  peaceful  calm  in  two  years 
when  he  entered  that  soft  fleecy  cloud  of  chloroform. 
Then  after  three  days,  all  the  premature  wrinkles  of  pain 
smoothed  out  of  his  brow,  and  once  again  the  old  joie 
de  vivre  flamed  up  in  his  face — a  triumph  of  antiseptic 
surgery.  In  the  coming  years,  no  doubt,  when  Africa  is 
a  gridiron  of  railways,  smart  brick  hospitals  will  grace 
these  latitudes,  but  no  surgeon  will  ever  boast  of  such 
fame  as  this  "  death-sleep "  lady  and  her  pioneer 
operation. 

The  scene  changes,  and  here  is  a  whole  town  in  the 
terrors  of  toothache,  my  dental  patients  numbering  not 
ten,  twenty,  or  thirty,  but  actually  more  than  fifty.  "  The 
lion  of  the  mouth  is  roaring  "  is  the  tribal  phrase  for  tooth- 
ache, and  the  only  remedy  known  is  to  attack  the  tooth 
with  an  axe.  That  is  to  say,  they  bring  the  tortured 
negro  up  to  the  axe,  then  fitting  in  a  plug  of  hard  wood 
against  the  stubborn  tooth,  the  axe  crashes  against  the 
plug,  sending  the  tooth,  in  some  cases,  down  the  man's 


458 


THINKING  BLACK 


throat.  No  wonder  when  the  theory  of  my  forceps  spread 
abroad  the  whole  town  tumbled  to  the  thing  with  joy,  one 
woman  with  perfectly  good  teeth  running  up  like  a  mad 
thing  and  distorting  her  mouth  for  me  to  operate.  "  Oh 
no,"  explained  she,  with  a  soft  sigh,  "  I  have  not  tooth- 
ache, but  the  lion  of  the  mouth  will  roar  after  you  are 
gone."  The  raw  bulk  of  my  dental  patients,  however,  had 
one  sing-song  plaint  translated  thus  into  honest,  thick- 
skulled  Hodge  dialect  :  "  You  needn't  mind  which,  they 
all  aches  at  times."  Yet  this  is  the  tribe  that  boasts  the 
ancient  proverb,  "  The  teeth  have  no  substitutes,"  and  the 
very  notion  of  an  Englishman  wearing  false  teeth  sets 
them  frantic  with  excitement.  So  ho,  the  ancients  were 
out,  for  the  teeth  have  excellent  substitutes.  The  Luban 
fad  in  the  fashion  of  teeth  is  that  the  four  lower  front 
teeth  must  be  knocked  out,  and  any  of  the  household  not 
so  maimed  is  compelled  to  shut  the  door  every  night  as  a 
punishment. 

On  the  Garenganze  shore  of  Lake  Mweru,  and  nestling 
at  the  foot  of  the  Bukongolo  Cliff,  you  find  the  average 
fishing  settlement  hidden  in  a  cloud  of  millions  of 
mosquitoes.  The  typical  hamlet  lies  at  the  north  of  a  dark 
glen  down  which  runs  a  mountain  stream,  and  on  the 
Lake  side  it  is  shut  oflF  from  view  by  dense  pith-tree 
forests,  a  weird  picture  these,  approximating  to  a  mangrove 
swamp.  Year  by  year,  the  rich  foreshore  along  the  foot 
of  the  cliff  is  growing  in  size,  the  mountains  sending  down 
boulders  and  also  a  rich  diluvial  soil  which  mixes  with  the 
beach  sand.    This  amalgam  is  a  garden  land  passing  rich 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  459 

and,  owing  to  the  inroads  of  Mweru,  just  the  desideratum 
for  rice-growing.  For  such  a  huge  expanse  of  water,  the 
crocodiles  are  surprisingly  scarce,  an  African  river  always 
boasting  more  than  a  lake.  This  penchant  for  rivers  by 
"  crocs  "  is  seen  even  on  the  Lake,  where  the  confluence  of 
any  stream  is  a  sure,  almost  the  only  sign  of  the  enemy. 
And  no  wonder  the  fisher-folk  coined  the  phrase  "  stealing 
water"  from  Luapula.  In  order  to  strike  fear  of  these 
oily  lurking  crocodiles  into  the  hearts  of  their  young 
people,  the  ordinary  message  a  mother  delivers  to  her 
child  is  :  "  Go  and  steal  some  water  from  the  crocodiles  !  " 
This  persistent  dread  of  being  snapped  has  given  the  ShUa 
child  phenomenally  quick  eyes,  and  their  mode  of  mani- 
pulating the  water-jar  has  almost  an  element  of  jugglery 
in  it.  I  remember  one  dark  day  when  a  fisherman  lost 
his  child  by  a  crocodile,  and  on  going  out  for  his  nets 
found  that  there  too  they  had  forestalled  him,  a  huge  one 
having  torn  his  nets  to  tatters.  Nor  does  the  fatalistic 
negro  even  attempt  to  better  things  for  the  tribe.  The 
elephant's  penchant  for  "  warranted  pure  water,"  however, 
is  often  a  means  of  its  death,  the  harpoon-trap  being 
usually  set  in  his  tracks  leading  to  water.  Here  is  an 
example  just  at  my  elbow.  There  is  a  great  roaring  out- 
side, and  it  turns  out  that  a  young  lad,  Walepa,  has  killed 
a  monster  elephant.  Ever  since  Mrs.  Crawford  put  this 
lad  under  chloroform  and  cut  off  his  arm,  Walepa  had 
been  thought  useless,  but  he  certainly  killed  his  elephant 
in  a  most  ruthlessly  efficient  manner.    The  negroes  who 

plume  themselves  on  having  two  arras  arc  now  showering 
28 


460 


THINKING  BLACK 


compliments  upon  him,  punctuated  with  hand-clapping. 
The  boy  had  heard  that  elephants  were  coming  to  drink 
at  an  adjacent  river,  so  setting  out  with  his  brother  he 
struck  their  trail  leading  to  water.  Taking  advantage  of 
an  overhanging  high  tree,  he  climbed  and  set  a  trap-spear 
overhead,  the  missile  of  death  pointing  "  dead-on  "  the 
elephant's  trail  leading  to  water.  But  how  was  he  to 
make  sure  that  the  spear  as  it  crashed  down  would  pierce 
a  vital  spot  ?  This  he  planned  most  slyly.  Climbing  the 
tree  with  a  small  gourd  of  water,  he  asked  his  brother  to 
stand  with  back  bent  full  in  the  trail  below.  And  now 
for  the  stroke  of  genius.  He  forthwith  proceeds  to  sight 
the  spear  by  aiming  at  his  brother's  backbone  with  the 
dripping  water  :  drip  !  drip  !  until  a  drop  finally  struck 
the  backbone.  What  next  ?  The  heavy  spear  is  now 
aimed  "  dead,"  and  the  youth  descends,  as  he  naively  puts 
it,  "  to  see  what  God  will  do  with  a  boy's  spear."  Sure 
enough,  a  brief  hour  sees  the  whole  boyish  plot  crowned 
with  fruition.  Shivering  with  fear,  the  crash  of  approach- 
ing elephants  is  heard,  and  the  monster  bull,  as  it  trumpets 
near  the  water,  receives  its  death-blow  from  the  descending 
barbed  spear.  The  negroes  glory  in  that  filthy,  frothy 
meat,  but  it  is  not  edible  to  Europeans.  It  would  need 
not  a  cook,  but  a  magician,  to  prepare  it.  The  ivory  is 
valued  at  sixty  guineas.  But  King  Leopold's  long  arm 
reaches  out  for  all  the  ivory,  the  resultant  revenue  to 
be  nobly  devoted  to  charity — the  charity  that  begins  at 
home. 

Ranging  the  Lake  with  your  eye  in  April,  you  can 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  461 


descry  a  curious  procession  of  Sindbad-the-Sailor  floating 
islets,  "  Bob-abouts  "  (  Visera)  their  name.  Really  clotted 
masses  of  papyrus,  duck-weed,  and  Phragmites,  these  have 
been  swept  down  by  the  Luapula  current,  the  rug  and  tug 
of  the  eddies  tearing  them  from  the  parent  bank  of  the 
river.  So  launched  in  the  first  instance  on  their  long 
voyage  by  the  swirling  Luapula,  this  same  current  pilots 
them  far  down-Lake,  their  destination  being  any  of  the 
capes  jutting  out  to  debar  farther  advance.  Funny  fact 
though  it  looks,  it  is  really  these  floatiug  islands  that  have 
crowded  Kilwa  in  mid-Lake  with  leopards,  and  the  islanders 
tell  the  tale  quite  circumstantially.  There  came  a  dark 
day  when,  like  a  pirate  flying  the  black  flag,  one  such 
floating  island  grounded  on  the  South  shore  of  Kilwa  with 
a  young  male  leopard  aboard,  a  poor  quadruped  Adam 
this,  without  an  Eve.  One  year  passed  and  yet  another, 
and  lo,  a  charming  lady-leopard  came  across,  cabin 
passenger,  if  you  please,  in  the  cosy  depths  of  another 
floating  island.  At  this  point  in  the  fisher  narrative  the 
naked  old  "  Admiral "  of  canoes  sticks  his  hands  into 
imaginary  pockets  and  drops  his  jaw.  Need  he  add  tlie 
sequel  ?  Both  at  the  mating  age,  that  quadruped  Eve 
really  robbed  them  of  their  Eden,  for  are  there  not  now  as 
many  leopards  as  negroes  on  the  island  ?  The  theory  that 
these  leopards  swam  across  such  an  expanse  of  Lake  is 
absurd,  albeit  a  leopard  is  the  l)est  swimmer  of  all  African 
Carnivora.  The  snug  depths  of  these  floating  islands  are 
shady  and  seductive  enough  to  account  for  such  curious 
cabin  passengers.    But  better  far  than  all  this  is  the 


462 


THINKING  BLACK 


splendid  shelter  all  such  afford  to  a  poor  fisherman  in  a 
dug-out  when  struck  by  a  white  squall.  To  avoid  sudden 
swamping  he  darts  his  canoe,  nozzle  first,  into  the  soft 
pulpy  island,  and  away  they  sail  together,  island  and 
canoe,  the  fisherman  as  dry  as  a  kiln  in  his  cool  shelter  of 
rank  floating  grass.  "Life-belt  Island"  we  named  one 
such,  for  it  saved  a  sailor's  life.  Here  is  a  native  who 
believes  that  God  could  not  love  His  Son,  since  He  gave 
Him  up  to  die.  His  reason  is  that  his  grandfather  was 
the  famous  Mwalumuna,  who  taught  what  true  paternal 
love  was.  When  far  out  on  Mweru  his  canoe  foundered. 
Letting  his  wife  sink,  he  battled  on  and  on  for  hours  in  the 
rough  water,  with  his  five-year-old  son  now  on  his  back 
and  now  on  his  breast.  Sunset  saw  them  safe  on  Kilwa 
Island  among  the  Arabs,  who  laugh  at  the  idea  of  such 
risk  of  life.  Their  proverb  runs,  "  If  the  water  come  like 
a  deluge,  place  thy  son  under  thy  feet  "—a  reference  this 
to  the  Arab  tradition  that  when  Noah's  rebel  sons  felt  the 
flood  gaining  on  their  mouths  to  choke  them  they  put  their 
sons  under  their  feet. 

The  hippo  is  a  great  factor  in  fisher-life,  and  poor 
young  Duvivier  was  killed  off"  Mulonde  River  by  a 
wild  one  not  far  from  our  door.  The  majority  of  Mweru 
hippos  have  been  galled  off"  and  on  by  the  harpoons  of 
the  fishermen,  and  the  only  safe  shot  is  from  the  land. 
Duvivier  had  given  his  animal  a  first  shot  and  was 
hoping  to  draw  upon  it  decisively  when  the  maddened 
brute  charged  from  beneath,  so  that  probably  the  brave 
young  fellow  was  engulfed  in  its  mouth,  for  I  could 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  463 


not  find  his  body  after  dredging  for  four  days.  The 
curious  fact  in  connection  with  these  Mweru  hippos  is 
that   they   are   grouped   in   austere   "  schools,"  called 
Matanga,  the  various   schools   all   known  intimately 
and  boasting  of  personal  names  like  genus  homo.  Thus 
the  old  grandpa  hippo  is  "  Mulonde  senior,"  while  grandma 
is  popularly  known  as  "  Mrs.  Kafulo,"  the   sons  and 
grandsons  all  boasting  of  a  serious  "  postal  address " 
appellation.      Great    excitement    prevails    among  the 
children  of  the  fishing  hamlet  when  a  bumpy- faced  little 
baby-hippo  pops  its  head  above  water  to  proclaim  its 
advent  into  hippodom.    A  queer  little  caricature  of  a 
hippopotamus,  heated  wrangles  take  place  among  the 
youngsters  over  its  christening  name,  and  I  found  one 
small  boy  at  Mulonde  offering  to  fight  the  whole  crowd 
(in  the  order  of  seniority),  rather  than  yield  his  nomination 
for  the  brand-new  pink  hippo-baby's  name.    Feeding  as 
they  do  at  the  rate  of  five  bushels  per  night,  the  poor 
fishers'  fields  are  raided  recklessly  ;  but  a  Shila  man  only 
shrugs  his  shoulders  and,  pointing  out  to  the  waves  of 
the  Lake,  says,  "  Yonder  is  my  well-furrowed  field ! " 
The  same  idea  this  as  when,  paddling  his  canoe,  he  claims 
to  be  "  a  miller  of  water  "  instead  of  a  miller  of  flour. 
This  serious  fact  as  to  a  hippo's  fixed  domicile  is  only 
proved  by  the  occasional  seeming   exception   when  a 
young  bull-hippo  "  marries  out "  of  the   school.  For 
although  he  hives  off  and  marries  into  another  school 
many  miles  distant,  yet  whenever  he  is  badly  wounded 
you  can  see  him  putting  out  to  sea,  and  blowing  like 


464 


THINKING  BLACK 


a  porpoise  as  he  s'.eers  straight  for  the  old  "postal 
address."  In  the  grip  of  an  imperative  intuition,  that 
homing  hippo  makes  a  bee-line  for  the  old  place  where, 
as  a  pink  baby,  it  was  christened  by  the  fishers'  children. 
It  is  a  Medo-Persic  law  among  hippos  that  they  must 
die  where  they  were  born. 

But  to  return  to  our  Lake-dwellers.    These  Shila 
fishermen  are  plucky  salts  who  hunt  the  hippo  with 
harpoons  on  their   "coggly"  dug-outs.    The   Lake  is 
full  of  a  very  pugnacious  sort,  which  crush  their  canoes 
on  occasion.    On  the  3rd  July,  at  the  South  end,  a  boat 
of  hunters  shouted  to  me  to  come  and  help,  and  sure 
enough  on  coming  up  with  them  I  found,  like  whalers 
playing  a  whale,  they  had  a  hard  hippo  in  hand.  He 
had  received  two  harpoons  and  was  makirig  away  with 
them  both — tugging  at  the  rope  like  a  dog  pulling  at 
his  chain.    The  local  hippo  clan  had  turned  out  to  the 
rescue,  surrounded  their  less  fortunate  fellow,  put  him 
most  loyally  in  the  centre  and  kept  him  there,  defying 
the  hunters  to  break  through  their  clannish  circle.  It 
was  a  real  sight  to  see  that  belt  of  big  heads  keeping 
hippo  guard.    Once  and  again  the  men  broke  through, 
evoking   only   reverberating   roars   from    the  enraged 
guardians,  and  narrowly  escaping  a  capsize.    On  came 
the  sturdy  "  dug-outers  "  with  loud,  ostentatious  splashing. 
On  came  tlic  heroic  hippos  with  a  rush  to  the  tourna- 
ment.   And  what  a  kill  !    Floating  usually  four  hours  after 
death,  this  one  died  in  the  sulks  and  his  brethren  of  the 
hippo  school  tucked  him  away  under  the  tangled  papyrus. 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  465 


Farther  along  a  bull-bippo  charged  me  in  a  dug-out  in 
his  best  swashbuckler  style.  Waited  for  him  quietly,  as 
in  two  or  three  plunging  springs  he  came  on,  bowling  and 
bellowing  in  rage  ;  then  got  a  bullet  in  through  his  open 
mouth,  A  momentary  and  momentous  hush,  then  up  he 
comes  with  a  suffocating,  explosive  noise,  spouting  blood. 
Anon,  taking  the  whole  Thames-at- Westminster-Bridge 
width  of  the  Lualaba,  he  floundered  and  writhed  in  his 
death-struggle,  lashing  the  placid  water  into  foam.  The 
final  act  was  to  throw  himself  theatrically  up  in 
the  air,  then,  with  a  sucking  swirl,  he  sank  like  a 
stone.  The  curious  touch  about  it  all  is  that  these 
hardy  blacks  are  naked  to  the  blast,  the  idea  being  that, 
as  they  must  get  wet,  a  cold  clammy  calico  clinging  to 
their  body  is  worse  than  a  natural  and  normal  nudity. 
In  fact,  these  droll  Shila  folk  take  this  matter  of  dress 
so  seriously  that  they  have  worked  out  at  a  solution 
exactly  the  opposite  to  ours.  For  the  same  man  who 
fishes  in  puris  naturalibus  can  be  seen,  under  broiling 
vertical  rays,  sporting  two  blankets,  our  nude  fishing 
friend  being  now  rolled  up  like  a  huge  sausage  in  his 
coils  of  calico. 

A  smile  got  the  better  of  me  when  old  Nyemba  began 
to  speak  seriously  of  "  his  goats,"  meaning  the  local 
school  of  hippos.  This  note  of  proprietorship  in  his 
possessive  pronoun  was  smile-provoking  when  one  re- 
flected that  the  said  hipi)Os  claimed  old  Nyemba 's  fields 
so  very  mucli  as  theirs  :  does  not  each  hippo  sup  on  his 
five  i)ushi'ls  of  vegetal »les  per  night  without  asking  the 


466 


THINKING  BLACK 


Chiefs  permit  ?  On  leaving,  I  reminded  ISIyemba  of  this 
by  way  of  a  parting  quip ;  but  a  challenge  of  this  kind 
rarely  finds  him  reluctant,  so  the  old  man  bade  me 
condescend  to  wait  a  moment  for  obstinate,  ocular  proof 
that  the  precious  hippos  were  really  his.  In  relating 
what  happened,  I  confine  myself  to  facts,  eschewing 
imputations.  The  Chief  mysteriously  whistled  up  all 
the  local  ladies,  and  made  them  group  themselves  on 
the  end  of  the  island,  the  water,  be  it  noted,  as  clear 
as  plate-glass,  and  for  hours  no  hippo  visible.  Had  not 
I  been  searching  for  hippos  the  whole  morning,  pre- 
pared to  shoot  upon  the  least  hint  of  a  ripple  ?  Well, 
at  the  Chief's  magician  signal  this  band  of  women  sent 
out  a  weird  shriek  to  the  water,  and  as  by  a  miracle 
a  school  of  five  black  hippo  heads  came  up  to  the  glassy 
surface  with  a  gasping  roar  as  obedient  salute.  One 
responsive  glance  they  gave  at  the  group  of  women,  and 
in  a  second  all  was  calm  again,  the  hippos  bobbing  below 
water.  Real  living  hippos,  truth  to  tell,  albeit  I  had 
spent  weary  hours  trying  in  vain  to  sight  even  one 
for  our  larder,  all  declining  obstinately  to  show  up.  Yet 
here  was  old  "  black  art "  Nyemba  with  a  school  of  hippos, 
so  to  speak,  hidden  up  his  sleeve,  the  homelier  diction 
of  the  sleeveless  Luban  for  this  phrase  being  "  hidden  up 
in  his  armpits."  But  the  old  Master  of  Ceremonies 
resolved  to  "  rub  in "  this  idea  of  his  proprietorship 
of  these  hippos,  so  once  again  he  made  assurance  doubly 
sure.  "  Try  again,  my  girls,"  he  shouted  to  the  women 
waving  his  staff  like  a  magician's  wand  ;  and  once  more, 


[From  SterciJi^raph,  i'ltdernotui      I'm/frnvotf,  I  oitdon. 

FOUR   THOUSAND   POUNDS  OF  BEEF. 
Ai  Cd.  the  lot. 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  4G7 


like  a  gramophone  record,  the  same  magic  shriek  rent 
the  same  still  air  with  the  same  magic  appearance  of 
the  hippos.  I  spent  the  whole  night  wondering  what 
this  A.omo-hippo  league  meant  at  all  at  all,  and — and  I 
am  wondering  still.  Call  it  "  black  art "  if  you  like, 
I  prefer  to  think  of  old  Nyemba  as  an  artful  black  :  the 
phenomenally  long  time  these  huge  hippos  were  sub- 
merged is  not  such  a  puzzle  after  all,  for  it  seems  as 
if  the  hippo's  very  ungainly  bulk  is  in  its  favour.  That 
is  to  say,  with  lungs  full  of  air,  his  specific  gravity 
thereby  becomes  almost  equal  to  that  of  water,  with  the 
result  that  he  can  coolly  walk  or  run  along  the  bottom 
of  the  river-bed  as  though  it  were  dry  land. 

With  a  land  of  this  sort  that  can  boast  not  one 
butcher's  shop,  sometimes  the  Missionary  with  his  own 
right  arm  can  open  up  a  long-shut  tribe  by  a  happy  kill 
of  hippo — fancy  thousands  of  pounds  of  beef  for  one 
bang  of  a  gun.  The  killing  of  one  such  monster  gave 
us  our  first  footing  on  the  Luapula.  By  a  long  detour 
of  miles  and  months  here  we  come  out  on  the  Luapula, 
striking  the  left  bank  a  few  miles  below  the  Falls — 
object :  to  pick  a  Mission  site  at  Johnston  Falls.^  Ad- 
vancing from  the  West  this  time  has  made  the  muddle, 
for  the  off-bank  is  agog  with  excitement,  my  quondam 
friends  "  turned  to  be  my  enemies."  Across  the  stream 
they  throw  many  a  dainty  morsel  of  black  logic  :  "  You 

'  Mr.  I'oineroy  began  here,  then  came  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Anderson,  Uicn  Mr. 
Campbell  and  others.  Tlic  second  phase  of  this  station  was  when  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Laniond  and  Mr.  Sims  re  tired  back  from  the  river  to  Kaleba,  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Campbell  branching  otT  to  begin  work  on  Lake  Bangweulu. 


468 


THINKING  BLACK 


came  "  (this  is  the  sort  of  thing)  "  from  the  North  only- 
three  months  ago,  and  now  you  come  from  the  West, 
therefore  you  are  not  you."  My  answer,  of  course,  is 
the  eager  echo  :  "  I  certainly  am  I,  but  you  are  not  you, 
because  I  guard  the  entente  coi^diale  (Chipwane)  while 
you  set  it  at  naught."  There  goes  Chief  after  Chief  filing 
past  on  the  off-bank  with  the  biggest  muster  of  guns 
he  ever  made,  every  man  of  them  munching  this  apple 
of  discord,  "  Why  advance  from  the  West,  when  you 
came  from  the  North  ?  "  A  reminder  this,  that  in  Central 
Africa  nearly  all  the  polemics  arise  from  our  negro's 
prejudices  as  to  a  suspected  point  of  the  compass — 
instance.  Sir  Alfred  Sharpe  repelled  for  coming  from  the 
East,  and  Hannington  murdered  because  he  entered 
Buganda  from  Busoga.  Nor  avails  it  to  reply  like  a 
wordy  windbag.  Deeds  are  the  only  eloquent  words  in 
such  a  fix,  so  I  produced  quite  a  knock-down  argument 
by — inviting  the  whole  tribe  to  dine  with  us.  Depend 
upon  it,  the  world's  slums  are  all  alike,  slum  street,  slum 
town,  or  slum  tribe,  and  the  simplest  solution  is — to  open 
a  huge  soup  kitchen,  free  tickets  for  Chiefs  and  slaves. 
This  is  that  line  of  least  resistance  so  inelegantly  rendered 
in  the  Luapula  alliterative  proverb,  "  Brow  of  brass,  but 
belly  of  butter."  Curious  way  of  capturing  a  tribe, 
camping  on  its  utmost  border  and  asking  your  enemies 
out — to  supper.  Without  money  and  without  price 
those  soup  tickets— and  no  wonder !  For  the  net  local 
cost  of  my  four  tons  of  hippo-meat  worked  out  at  the 
round  sum  of — sixpence.    Eight  thousand  nine  hundred 


BLACK  MAN  =  BLACK  MANNERS  469 


and  eighty  pounds  of  meat,  not  at  6d.  per  lb.,  but  the 
whole  8980  lb.  costing  a  single  and  solitary  sixpence. 

This  is  how  it  came  about.  Slipping  over  to  the 
hostile  bank  by  stealth  at  sundown,  I  killed  a  monster 
hippo  in  its  very  best  days.  Tried  the  temple  shot,  and 
the  bullet  zigzagged  through  the  brain — magic  bullet 
that,  for  did  it  not  metaphorically  slay  also  the  enmity  of 
my  hundreds  of  enemies  ?  Listen  to  yonder  glad  cry  on 
the  ofF-bank  ;  the  news  catches  on,  drums  beating  and 
clouds  of  canoes  darting  across  in  the  dusk  to  verify  the 
kill.  Canoes,  nota  bene,  yet  there  were  no  such  things  in 
these  latitudes  yesterday — oh  no,  scarcely  knew  what  a 
canoe  was.  Now,  where  the  carcass  is,  there  are  the 
vultures  gathered  together — and  in  boats,  too.  Yesterday 
they  shot  angry  glances  at  us — now,  picture  the  same 
softened  eyes  with  that  dreamy  look  one  sees  in  a  kitten's 
when  it  smells  frying  fish.  Yesterday  they  were  lolling 
in  the  sun,  a  tribe  of  indolents.  Here  they  are  at  a  later 
phase  rushing  on  this  beef  with  the  tense  concentration  of 
a  crowd  making  for  the  refreshment-room  at  a  station 
where  the  train  stops  three  minutes.  But  do  not  quote 
too  quickly  against  them  Paul's  "  whose  god  is  their 
belly "  ;  do  so,  and  you  are  at  the  bad  old  business  of 
beating  a  cripple  with  his  own  crutches.  He  has  got  a 
reason,  and  here  it  comes.  That  is  to  say,  such  a  serious 
chemist  is  this  negro,  that  if  you  give  him  plain  flour 
with  no  "relish,"  he  will  go  to  bed  hungry  rather  than 
touch  mere  carbo-hydrates  without  the  adequate  albumi- 
noids.   In  other  words,  that  ravenous  shriek  of  his  you 


470 


THINKING  BLACK 


hear  at  the  hippo  banquet  has  one  meaning  only — 
Nitrogen  !  Why  is  it  that  the  African  alone  has  special- 
ised here  and  coined  a  word  for  "  meat-hunger  "  (Kashia)  ? 
Why  a  special  substantive  if  not  that  there  is  a  specially 
substantial  craving  behind  it  ?  He  ravens  on  that  meat, 
his  very  blood  and  bone  crying  out  like  chemists  for  the 
needed  nitrogen.  Red  raw  flesh  covered  with  blood  is  the 
thing  beloved  of  the  negro — torn  off  the  animal  just  after 
it  has  been  shot,  muscles  still  quivering. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 
"The  Year  of  Love":  an  Epilogue 


"  For  while  the  tired  waves  dimly  breaking 
Seem  here  no  painful  inch  to  gain, 
Far  out,  by  creeks  and  inlets  waking, 
Comes  silent,  flooding  in,  the  main." 

*  *  * 

"The  noisy  waves  are  a  failure,  but  the  silent  tide 

is  a  success."  Phillips  Brooks. 

*  *  » 

"Such  a  tide  as  moving  seems  asleep, 

Too  full  for  sound  and  foam."  Tennyson. 


4T« 


CHAPTER  XXIII 


Epilogue 

(Luanza.) 

KNOW  ye,  therefore,  that  unquenchable  hope  was 
crowned  at  last,  for  the  glad  year  1905  was 
termed  Mivaka  wa  Lusa,  or  "  the  Year  of  Love." 
Somebody  drew  blank  when  he  said  that  Hope  makes  a 
good  breakfast  but  a  bad  supper,  for  there  is  no  throb  of 
joy  akin  to  the  darkest  hour  merging  into  dawn.  For 
look  what  befell  us.  At  Koni,  Johnston  Falls,  and 
Luanza  it  was  the  same  story  and  the  same  time. 

All  these  sterile  years  the  Gospel  had  been  stored  up 
in  Garenganze  folk  mentally,  like  so  much  sound  money 
that  returned  no  interest.  They  listened,  and  they 
watched  us  with  their  ferret  eyes,  and,  of  course,  they  had 
their  difficult  questions  to  ask,  yet  answer  some  of  them 
we  could  not.  I  admire  your  African,  because  you  can 
never  get  out  of  a  difficulty  with  him  under  the  fog  of  a 
definition.  He  may  have  a  funny  figure-of-eight  twist 
in  his  query,  but  it  is  always  to  the  point.  Alas  !  the 
average  white  man's  remarks  to  the  negro,  though  lacking 
point,  are  always  j>ointed.  The  story  of  these  long  sterile 
years  of  sowing  was  supremely  simple  from  the  African's 

standpoint.    Intruding,  as  we  had  done,  into  his  darkness 

m 


474 


THINKING  BLACK 


with  our  Gospel  of  God,  the  said  Gospel  made  too  prepos- 
terous and  impossible  a  claim  upon  him.  Hence  his  blunt 
black  challenge  to  the  Missionary  :  "  Well,  you  just  sit 
down  here  and  live  your  Gospel  for  twenty  years  or  so, 
and  then  we  will  believe  you."  Thus,  for  nearly  a  genera- 
tion, did  the  negro's  face  set  in  those  obstinate  lines  of 
Christ-rejection  so  well  known  to  us,  and  it  has  taken  all 
that  time  for  the  truth  to  get  home  to  his  hard  heart  that 
all  our  Gospelling  was  not  the  mere  effusion  of  a  passing 
excitement.  This  "  pegging  away  "  is  what  the  African 
calls  "  the  pertinacity  of  a  fly,"  the  compliment  being 
equivocal,  as  most  African  flies  have  a  sting  in  them. 
Some  flies,  like  some  Missionaries,  even  give  "sleeping 
sickness  " — a  curious  sort  of  jag  that  must  be  if  it  makes 
you  sleep  instead  of  wakening  you  up.  And  "  sting  "  is 
the  very  idea  in  bush-preaching,  for  the  unblushing  sin 
forces  Evangelist  to  be  as  plain  as  John  Bunyan.  Hence 
that  negro  obstinacy,  and,  if  you  have  only  pertinacity 
enough,  the  said  obstinacy  can  easily  work  out  at 
malignity.  Mr.  PecksniS"  has  not  yet  been  born  in 
Central  Africa,  and,  as  we  have  seen,  the  nude  negro  has 
nude  speech  :  one  cheery  old  gentleman  used  to  exhort 
us  in  the  pros  and  cons  of  this  attack  of  ours  on  the 
citadel  of  the  negro  soul.  "  Remember,"  said  he,  "  if  you 
hit  the  body  only  on  one  spot  you  will  soon  raise  a  lump." 
This  is  true  enough,  for  although  you  can  easily  laugh  and 
chat  yourselves  into  the  good  graces  of  a  negro,  yet 
remember  that  is  only  the  nominal  surface  black  man  you 
have  conciliated.    Scratch  this  coloured  Russian  on  the 


EPILOGUE 


475 


subject  of  sin  and  you  verily  find  a  Tartar.  The  hint  of 
obstinacy  is  seen  in  the  very  set  of  the  jaw.  No,  mere 
sophistry  will  not  break  him,  and  only  the  power  of  God 
can  make  him  throw  the  doors  of  his  nature  open  to  the 
Christ.  But  the  "  raising  of  a  lump  "  is  only  one  side  of 
the  "  pegging-away "  story,  and  the  very  cheery  face  of 
our  old  exhorter  was  enough  to  make  you  ask  where  his 
lump  was  after  so  much  sermon-tasting.  "  But,"  says 
this  old  man,  "  there  is  another  aspect  to  this  Gospel- 
thumping  of  yours,  and  remember  also,  0  white  man, 
that  if  you  beat  the  drum  on  one  spot  only  you  will  crack 
it."  Sure  enough,  the  very  next  day  one  of  the  biggest 
drums  the  Devil  owned  in  the  country  was  cracked, 

B  was  a  notorious  thief  who  had  been  in  the  Belgian 

chain  more  than  once,  and  many  a  time  he  had  wept,  not 
the  tears  of  penitence,  but  of  revolt.  For  years,  with  a 
customary  placidity,  he  had  gone  the  hard  way  of 
rebellion.  "  Wasted"  was  the  word  my  pen  had  almost 
tricked  me  into  writing  concerning  the  pile  of  religious 
ammunition  directed  against  all  such.  But  "  is  not  My 
Word  a  Hammer  ? "  said  the  Lord,  and  that  holy  hammer 
broke  him.  For  what  the  Congo  law  could  not  do  (by 
sjambok  and  chain),  in  that  it  was  weak  through  Butugu's 
sinful  flesh,  God  did  in  power.  Ah,  there  is  nothing 
breaks  the  rebel's  back  like  the  flash  of  memory — "  My 
God  hath  remembered  me." 

Leading  up  to  this  "Year  of  Love,"  what  was  the  raw 
native's  line  of  defence,  or  had  he  any  ?  Slaves,  for 
instance,  whose  souls  were  ploughed  with  the  ploughshare 


476 


THINKING  BLACK 


of  anguish,  why  did  they  not  troop  under  the  Christ's 
banner  ?  The  curious  answer  is  found  in  their  deep-seated 
idea  that  this  only  was  of  God,  this,  the  raw  heathendom 
in  which  God  had  caused  them  to  be  born.  Not  once, 
but  a  hundred  times,  have  I  heard  the  native  claim  "  God  " 
as  the  Author  of  it  all.  "  God's  law  "  {Mukanda  wa  Leza) 
was  the  phrase  for  all  their  tribal  customs,  and  the  very 
variety  of  men  and  manners  on  the  face  of  the  earth  was 
their  argument  against  the  unity  that  is  in  Christ.  There 
are  genuine  phrases  that  have  gone  the  round  of  the 
Garenganze  for  centuries,  which,  literally  translated,  look 
like  the  language  of  pious  resignation  :  "  Ah,  God's  time 
has  not  come  yet."  "Had  it  been  God's  gift  to  you,  you 
would  have  got  it."  "God  is  great:  whoever  conquered 
Him?  He  killeth  even  the  aristocrats."  And  so  on,  in 
dark  fatalistic  sing-song,  the  name  of  God  bandied  about 
on  every  subject,  and  blowing  in  on  the  soul  like  a  cold 
Arctic  blast.  I  have  met  serious  students  of  theology 
who  were  embarrassed  because  the  Africans  have  no  idea 
of  Satan  and  his  sinister  personality,  whereas  the  real 
puzzle  would  be  to  find  out  how  they  could  possibly  know 
of  the  existence  of  a  specific  fallen  angel  named  Diabolus, 
alias  Satan.  The  master-stroke  of  the  Devil  is  that  he, 
ill  Africa,  has  not  only  lied  most  subtly  all  the  centuries 
against  God,  but  has  hidden  himself  behind  his  own  lie. 

"And  so  they've  voted  the  Devil  out 
And  of  course  the  Devil's  gone, 
But  simple  people  would  like  to  know 
Who  carries  his  business  on." 


EPILOGUE 


477 


Yet  God  was  over  all  even  then,  and  in  some  crude 
sense  these  poor  wanderers  from  Him  were  under  a 
schoolmaster  leading  them  to  Christ.  Crudely,  granted, 
yet  even  Paul  dignifies  that  intuition  of  theirs  by  the 
exalted  name  of  "  law  "  when  he  insists  that  they,  too,  are 
a  "law  unto  themselves."  One  of  the  strongest  threads 
in  the  fabric  of  their  national  life  is  the  austere  creed  of 
taboo,  and  here  is  a  fresh  "as  we  go  to  press"  example. 
Just  a  minute  ago  I  tried  hard  to  get  a  tiny  boy  named 
Kasongo  to  eat  a  fish.  Pinched  with  hunger,  here  was  a 
little  nipper  with  no  "moral"  backbone,  yet  he  shut  his 
milk  teeth,  and  defied  all  my  entreaty.  No,  he  dare  not 
break  tribal  taboo,  dare  not  touch  fish,  wheedle  him  as 
you  may.  Poor  superstition  of  course  it  all  is,  but  at 
least  the  negro  breed  is  thereby  stronger  in  grit  and 
tenacity  of  purpose,  and  in  some  sense  this  loyalty  to  law- 
keeping  does  not  soften  the  fibre  of  his  black  mind.  In 
fact,  the  day  this  type  of  negro  weeps  for  sin  will  be  the 
same  glorious  date  when  that  very  negro  will  welcome 
Christ  into  his  life  by  the  front  door  of  fearlessness  and 
not  by  the  back  door  of  cowardice.  Nor  will  you  need  to 
spend  long  hours  indoctrinating  him  with  ideas  as  to  the 
sanctity  of  law  ^?er  se.  He  has  got  that  in  his  bones,  for 
in  his  own  tribal  taboo  did  he  not  "  play  the  game "  ? 
Thus  Christ  subjugates  all  things  unto  Himself,  and 
instead  of  casting  away  the  old  spear  of  taboo,  he  now 
converts  it  into  a  Gospel  ploughshare.  Is  there  no  taboo 
in  the  Ecclesia  ?    I  trow  there  is.    Are  there  no  holy 

"  thou  shalt  not's  "  in  Christianity  ?    And  did  the  negro 
29 


478  THINKING  BLACK 

not  spend  his  life  learning  how  sacred  even  a  human 
"  thou  shalt  not "  can  be  ? 

Then,  again,  quite  a  bright  streak  of  hope  is  seen  in 
the  conversion  of  chiefs  of  honourable  status  in  the  land, 

K  ,  one  of  these,  tells  his  conversion  in  a  manly, 

precise  way.  Chief  on  the  Bukongolo  Range,  he  says  he 
often  came  down  from  the  hills  to  attend  the  meetings, 
ay,  even  in  the  rain  he  made  a  try  to  be  there.  "  Believe  ?  " 
says  he;  "No,  I  wore  out  two  gospel  halls  in  Christ- 
rejection."  Quaint  idea  to  think  of  wearing  out  a  hall  as 
you  wear  out  an  old  pair  of  boots.  The  first  mud  hall 
was  eaten  by  white  ants  and  had  to  be  replaced  by  an- 
other, and  as  K  saw  even  a  third  hall  while  yet  a  rebel 

at  heart,  this  poignant  fact  was  the  straw  that  broke  the 
camel's  back  :  "I  have  actually  w^orn  out  two  meeting- 
houses in  Christ-rejection."  No  beauty  he,  only  one  of 
the  old  cut-throats  who  did  Mushidi's  dirty  work  for  a 
dirty  reward.  But  the  Gospel  has  even  done  something 
for  his  ugly  face,  for  the  old  doggy  and  insinuating  leer  is 
gone  and  the  gleam  of  the  life  eternal  shoots  out  of  the 
eyes.  How  true  that  a  negro's  black  face  is,  after  all,  not 
the  same  thing  as  his  countenance  !  God  makes  a  man's 
face,but  a  man  makes  his  own  countenance.  Certainly  hand- 
some is  as  handsome  does  in  Africa,  and  old  K  has  got 

one  thing  at  any  rate  out  of  Christianity,  for  the  dynamic 
of  the  Cross  sends  him  to  bed  with  a  sweet  mouth  and 
a  clean  mind.  At  first,  all  alone  in  his  own  town,  he  had  a 
hard  battle,  the  saved  chief  and  his  wilful  people  being  at 
daggers  drawn,    Christ  seemingly,  as  of  yore,  had  not 


EPILOGUE 


479 


come  to  send  peace  in  their  midst,  but  a  sword,  and  the 
old  tug-of-war  between  right  and  wrong  began.  No 
sugar-plum  expressions  here,  for  light  fights  darkness 
with  a  glittering  blade,  the  gleam  being  all  the  brighter 
in  the  inky  blackness.  Like  a  living  tree  in  a  timber- 
yard,  he  grew  nobly,  and  now,  after  six  years,  he  has  won 
a  small  nucleal  band  of  Christians  who  daily  meet  in 
his  town.  Thus  those  stunted,  stifled  souls  at  long  last  get 
a  chance.  Like  a  toy  town  hall  in  the  centre  of  his  village 
you  can  descry  a  nice  schoolhouse  he  has  built  for  his 
people. 

Too  many  Africans  see  Christ  in  a  book  as  we  see 
places  in  a  map,  but  here  is  a  genuine  case  of  a  young 
man  converted  by  merely  reading  John's  Gospel.  Too 
big  for  our  elementary  school,  he  went  his  own  way  in  sin, 
but  still  clung  to  his  copy  of  John  as  a  fetish.  Then  old 
Africa — the  Africa  of  sin  and  sorrow — began  to  wind  its 
tentacles  round  him,  and  he  was  speedily  becoming  the 
usual  bleared-of-eye  negro  with  whom  Jesus  Christ  is  the 
Great  Unmentionable  in  his  unhallowed  hut.  But  he 
was  reckoning  without  God  and  the  Word  of  God,  which 
is  not  bound — did  he  not  still  cling  to  his  copy  of  John's 
Gospel  ?  Well,  watch  the  divine  logic  of  events  involved 
in  the  treasure  of  a  truth  that  "  where  the  word  of  a  King 
is,  there  is  power."  One  day  the  gun-cotton  of  John's 
Gospel  came  in  contact  with  the  tinder  of  his  rebellion, 

and  this  K  was  literally  exploded  into  the  kingdom. 

For  out  from  the  pages  of  "  John  of  the  Bosom  "  came  the 
assertive  call,  "  Follow  Me ! "  and  that  one  word  rugged 


480  THINKING  BLACK 

off  the  terrible  tentacles  from  his  soul,    K         can  only 

explain  his  conversion  in  the  quaintly  choice  words :  "  I 
was  startled  to  find  that  Christ  could  speak  Chiluba.  I 
heard  Him  speak  out  of  the  printed  page,  and  what  He 
said  was,  'Follow  Me  ! "'  And  then  it  was  he  entered  the 
new  era  of  reading  the  Old  Book,  for  was  it  not  a  fact 
that  now  God  was  staring  out  at  him  from  every  page, 
and  shouting  in  his  ears  ?  Those  rays  of  light  that  darted 
out  of  Galilee  long  ago  have  lit  up  these  poor  dark  glens 
with  gladness.  Simply  and  satisfyingly  a  soul  settles  for 
eternity  on  the  living  Word  of  God.  An  old  negro  chief 
from  the  South  end  has  just  sent  in  a  message  to  his 
brethren  here,  and  there  is  the  same  ring  of  assurance  as 
to  the  Word  of  God.  "  Tell  my  brethren  at  Luanza," 
says  he,  "  that  Christ  keeps  me  down  here  all  alone  by 
the  Gospel  according  to  Mark."  The  only  portion  of  the 
Bible  he  has,  to  him  "  Mark  "  equates  the  whole  revelation 
of  God,  and  even  "  Romans  "  and  "  Ephesians  "  are  only 
portions  of  the  great  "  Marko,"  his  first  and  faithful  friend. 
Sterile  though  the  soil  be,  the  seed  is  the  Word  of  God  : 
you  may  count  the  apples  on  the  tree,  but  who  can  count 
the  trees  in  the  apple  ?  You  may  tell  the  acorns  on  the 
oak,  but  not  the  oaks  in  the  acorn. 

Yet  such  thick  lips  can  drop  pearls.  It  is  delightful 
to  see  God  taking  up  these  Gentiles,  and  speaking  with 
other  lips  and  a  stammering  tongue,  stiff  old  phrases 
going  into  the  melting-pot  of  negro  mouths  and  being 
poured  out  in  fresh  fluidity.  "  The  Book  of  Acts,"  for 
instance,  becomes  "  Words  concerning  Deeds  "  ;   "  the 


EPILOGUE 


481 


Lord's  Table  "  becomes  the  "  Feast  of  Memories,"  or  the 
"  Table  of  Tears  " ;  and  as  worship  is  in  the  spirit  they 
have  cleverly  coined  the  verb  "  to  spirit "  as  the  true 
ideal  of  approach  to  God,  for  what  but  spirit  can  reach 
"  The  Spirit "  ?  Perceive  the  astute  negro  at  this  most 
sensible  word-coinage,  for  pepa  is  the  verb  "  to  spirit," 
just  as,  say,  "  a  drink  "  is  a  noun  with  "  to  drink  "  as  its 
satellite  verb.  Sensible  all  this  surely,  for  there  you 
have  an  otherwise  materialistic  negro  ignoring  the  mere 
sight  of  his  eyeballs  and  talking  away  to  nothing  visible 
with  shut  eyes — he  is  "  spiriting,"  i.e.  worshipping.  Deep- 
sea  sounding  some  of  their  happy  thoughts  are.  "  Eter- 
nity," for  example,  is  called  "the  lifetime  of  God 
Almighty,"  and  the  gift  of  Life  Eternal  is  merely  a 
pledge  that  they  will  live  as  long  as  God  lives,  eternal 
death  being  "  a  dying  as  long  as  God  is  living."  When 
you,  their  white  teacher,  blunder  along  in  your  exposition 
it  is  not  uncommon  to  see  a  far-away  look  on  your 
hearers'  faces,  painfully  suggestive  of  the  fact  that  they 
are  all  off  on  a  scent  of  their  own !  For  what  to  you 
may  be  a  mere  commonplace  of  normal  Christian  thought 
— "Book  of  Acts,"  for  example — is  to  him  full  of  sweet, 
subtle  suggestion — "  Words  about  Deeds  " — a  full  current 
of  new  thought  switched  on.  Sure,  here  it  is  we  all  learn 
how  much  we  have  yet  to  learn,  every  truth  in  Africa 
being  like  a  bit  of  Labrador  spar — it  has  no  lustre  as 
you  turn  it  in  your  hand  until  you  come  to  a  particular 
angle,  then  it  shows  deep  and  beautiful  colours.  But 
what  if  you  miss  the  said  angle  precisely  when  your 


482- 


THINKING  BLACK 


negro  spies  it  ?  This  fact  it  is  that  sends  your  audience 
off  on  its  own,  the  speaker  losing  the  lustre  at  the  precise 
moment  when  the  black  man  has  caught  the  accurate 
angle  of  flashing  light.  Thus,  in  Africa,  what  you  do 
not  say  is  often  more  eloquent  than  your  long  windy 
homily.  Yes,  black  as  coal  every  one  of  them  ;  yet,  after 
all,  diamonds  are  made  of  soot,  albeit  the  how,  when,  and 
where  of  the  miracle  we  may  not  know.  Moreover,  it 
doth  not  yet  appear  what  this  black  land  of  ours  shall 
be,  but  we  know  that  God  with  swift,  silent  steps  can 
come  and  give  the  crystallising  touch  that  makes  the 
diamond  flash  out  of  the  quondam  soot.  "  Rags,"  the 
Arabs  call  our  black  parishioners,  forgetful  of  the  fact  that 
rags  make  the  whitest  paper  :  so  what  man  can  do  in  the 
paper  line  surely  God  can  surpass  in  souls. 

Quite  a  serious  theologian  the  negro  becomes,  and  here 
it  is,  greatly  daring,  he  taps  all  the  unsuspected  sources  of 
language.  In  the  things  of  God  this  young  black  Christian 
is  in  some  sense  a  sort  of  negro  Columbus  setting  out  to 
discover  a  new  world  of  wonder.  His  word  for  "  heaven  " 
is  a  good  example  of  the  Luban's  finesse  and  regard 
for  detail,  coupled  with  a  knowledge  of  sound  philology. 
Shells  we  find  on  the  beach,  for  pearls  we  must  dive,  and 
most  appropriately  has  he  dived  for  this  great  pearl- word 
"heaven"— is  not  each  gate  of  The  Glory  a  pearl?  The 
plain  philology  of  this  word  "  Mwiulu"  then,  gives  you 
the  meaning  of  "  heaven  "  as  "  the  entering  into  all  the 
highest  times,  and  places,  and  manners,  and  methods  of 
living  life."  This  means  that  Christians,  as  "  the  heavenly 


EPILOGUE 


483 


people,"  are,  literally  and  not  exaggeratingly,  "  the  folks 
who  enter  into  all  the  highest  places,  plus  the  highest 
times,  plus  the  very  highest  manners,  plus  the  only  first- 
class  methods  of  service."  Far  from  this  long  definition 
sucking  all  the  juice  out  of  such  a  luscious  fruit  as  the 
word  "  heaven,"  a  negro  at  my  elbow  claims  that  I  have 
omitted  two  links  in  the  chain  of  meaning  :  the  link  of 
cause,  and  the  link  of  design.  So  that  while  the  entering 
into  all  the  highest  times,  highest  places,  highest  manners, 
highest  methods  is  ours,  we  must  not  omit  this  entering 
into  life's  highest  causes  and  highest  designs  also !  No 
chance  example  this,  as  dozens  of  instances  prove.  Take 
another.  If  you  quote  the  Psalm  to  him,  "  Our  times  are 
in  Thy  hand,"  he  will  be  forced  to  translate  it  in  the 
gorgeous  words — "  All  my  life's  why's  and  when's  and 
where's  and  wherefore's  are  in  God's  hand ! "  The  sane 
grammar  of  this  is  that  particles  of  space  are  all  necessarily 
units  of  time,  place,  manner,  and  degree  (just  as  in 
English  we  say  "  the  space  between  the  table  and  the 
door,"  and  "  the  space  of  half  an  hour"). 

Simple  in  strength  and  strong  in  simplicity,  the  best 
sort  of  young  black  Christian  delights  to  push  out  into 
the  adjacent  hamlets  with  the  Gospel.  Far  from  being 
professional  preachers,  they  "  talk  "  the  Gospel — a  straight 
talk  in  his  own  town  being  more  tantalising  to  a  raw 
negro  than  a  hundred  sermons.  For  in  a  sermon  he 
knows  where  he  is  (or  rather,  you  do,  for  he  often  nods), 
but  these  terribly  personal  talks  jag  him  into  contrition. 
After  all,  there  is  no  need  for  shooting  at  sparrows  with 


484 


THINKING  BLACK 


heavy  artillery,  and  Africa's  true  evangelisation  begins 
when  the  simple  negroes  start  to  talk  about  redeeming 
love  among  themselves.  No  English  twang  or  mannerisms 
in  that  negro  talk.  With  the  converted  African,  Christ's 
mercy,  like  the  water  in  a  vase,  takes  the  shape  of  the 
vessel  that  holds  it.  Your  constant  joy  is  to  hear  in  a 
foreign  lingo  some  simple  old  fact  of  faith  taking  a  new 
meaning  by  one  twist  of  the  negro  tongue.  Here  is  a 
Chief  who  takes  up  the  cudgels  for  his  abandoned  (?)  race, 
and  claims  that  if  the  Gospel  is  really  for  everybody  then 
they  have  as  much  right  as  we  to  an  offer  of  same.  To 
meet  his  challenge,  I  read  out  the  record  of  the  impotent 
man  at  Bethesda,  and  venture  to  urge  that  here  is  one  who 
has  the  same  complaint  as  ignored  Africa  :  "  Sir,  I  have 
no  man."  So  we  get  the  opening,  and  advancing  into 
the  salvation  of  the  subject  I  tell  that  tale  of  divine  cure 
— the  cure  of  the  man  that  had  no  man  to  help  while 
others  got  the  good  things.  Then  we  come  to  the  point. 
What  I  now  want  is  an  assurance  from  my  petulant  Chief 
that  here  at  last  he  understands  my  drift.  "Oh,"  he 
said,  "  that  is  very  simple:  the  thirty-eight-years-sick  man 
is  like  unto  our  abandoned  Africa  ;  the  man  said,  /  have 
no  man,  but  Christ  said,  Im  your  Man." 


L'ENVOI 


T  \OfVN  goes  the  sun  like  a  ball  of  fire  over  dark 
i  y  Lubaland.  Tke  first  sough  of  the  cold  night  wind 
goes  through  like  a  dart.  The  distant  dogs  in  the 
fishing  hamlet  howl.  The  frogs  croaky  croak,  and  the  bitterns 
bump,  bump.  To  climax  weirdness,  the  fire  has  recently 
swept  through  the  long  yellow  grass,  covering  the  land  with 
a  dark  pall.  The  sluggish  stream  by  which  we  camp  seems 
a  mere  trickle  of  liquid  mud,  the  only  hint  of  water  being  the 
deeper  dye  of  green  down  its  hollow.  There  you  draw  your 
drinking  water  the  colour  of  bad  tea  ;  there,  too,  at  sunset 
the  reed-buck  comes  down  to  drink.  And  as  the  darkness 
deepens  the  sighing  sounds  of  Africa  s  dark  are  heard  saying — 

«« THE  NIGHT  COMETH  WHEN  NO  MAN  CAN  WORK." 
•  •  * 

Afar  the  Golden-Crested  Crane  is  calling'. 


1 


INDEX 


Abbreviated  names,  428,  429. 
Abstract,  The,  279-281. 
Acacia  thorn,  366. 
Acacias,  202,  386,  393,  402. 
Achokwe,  12. 

Acts,  The  Book  of  the,  480,  481. 
Africa,  To[.sy-turvy,  70,  230,  371. 

Vastness  of,  iiiiip  facing  164. 

"  sunny  fountains,"  439. 
African,  The  debased,  143,  144,  442. 

diet,  99,  100,  316,  413. 

"Divide,"  The,  20. 

forests,  315,  353,  375  ff. 

hamlets,  88,  144,  347,  439-442. 

hunter,  436-439. 

ladies,  51,  52,  105. 

liars,  78-80. 

names  for  white  men,  21,  22. 
orphan.  An,  453. 

sayings,  249,  252,  313.    See  Sayings. 

skies,  99,  153. 

winter,  72,  335. 
Albert,  Kin^,  414. 
Alexander,  Czar,  195. 
Alice  in  Wonderland,  59,  136,  449. 
Alma,  30}. 

Amazon,  A  negro,  232. 

American  Missionaries,  37,  50,  51,  113, 

204. 
Amos,  432. 

Amputation  of  arm,  457,  459. 
Ancient  Britons,  7,  140,  326,  352. 
Anderson,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  467. 
Andriaiie,  killed  by  cannibals,  330. 
An<(lo-Biintu, 
Angola,  3. 
Animals — 

Ant-bear,  334,  357. 

Antclojics,  87,  88,  231,  818,  348,  366. 

Badger,  370. 

Boar,  Wild,  348. 

Buck,  Red,  87,  88,  269. 
Reed,  485. 

Crocodile.s,  83,  274,  321,  433-435,469. 

Dogs,  52,  95,  244,  272-274,  348. 


Animal.s — continued. 

Elephants.    See  under  name. 
Indian,  257-259. 

Fish,  88,  89,  168,  413,  477. 

Frogs,  54,  485. 

Gnu,  162. 

Goats,  232,  336. 

Hippos,  426,  462-470. 

Hyena,  55,  296. 

Jackals,  88,  162,  385. 

Leeches,  435,  436. 

Leopards,  106,  461. 

Lions.    See  under  name. 

Monkeys,  84,  85,  86,  315,  316. 

Pigs,  53,  54. 

Rabbit,  175. 

Ratel,  370. 

Rats,  312,  324. 

Snails,  52,  95,  312. 

Snakes,  52,  251,  252,  324,  385. 
Boa-constrictors,  313-315. 
Mamba,  252. 

Toads,  54. 

Zebras,  164,  231. 
Anne  of  Austria,  385. 
Annexation,  Attempted,  300. 
Ant-bear,  The,  334,  357. 
Antelojjes,  87,  88,  231,  348. 

killed  by  rinderpest,  366. 

Lost,  313. 
Ant-hill.s,  114,  322,  386. 
Ants  as  food,  312,  385. 
Antiquity,  76,  234. 
Anton,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  319,  354,  355. 
Ai)pU'yni(l,  280. 
Api)rciilicesbii),  African,  50. 
Arabs,  Hitter  blasphemy  of,  199. 
building  Mushidi's  palace,  168. 
canoes,  398. 

contrasted  with  Euro))eans,  200,  201. 
condemned  to  death,  201-203. 
consult  lion  king,  267. 
Danger  from,  326. 
den,  398. 
designs,  342. 


1 


INDEX 


Arabs'  domination  broken,  330. 
in  Mushidi's  capital,  190,  199. 
leader,  361. 

lines,  Slipjnng  through,  343. 
Murdered  by,  246. 
name  for  negroes,  95,  482. 
on  Kilwa  Island,  361. 
prayers,  199,  200. 
provide  wife  for  Mushidi,  295. 
raiders,  415. 
Roaming,  203. 
sayings,  81,  230. 
scouts,  403. 
slavers,  32. 
tradition,  An,  462. 
Arethtcsa,  The,  403. 

Arguments    of  cannibals,    337,  340, 
341. 

Aristotle,  240,  440. 
Arithmetic,  African,  278. 
Arnold,  Matthew  (quoted),  298. 
Arnot,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  74,  209,  415. 
Arrows,  Poisoned,  268,  352,  353. 
Ashley  Downs  orphans,  210. 
Asking  questions,  140,  450,  454. 
Atlantic,  Farewell  to  the,  33. 
Attacked  by  hippo,  465. 
Axe  thrown  at  boy,  333,  334. 

Babies,  African,  144. 
Baby-betrothal,  452. 
Baby  cutting  its  teeth,  236-238. 

drowned  in  Lake,  237. 

hippos,  463,  464. 

Newborn,  124. 

pioneers,  18,  19. 

The  Mission,  416. 
Babylon,  A  Black,  167,  192,  193. 
Badger's  distillery,  370. 
Bagdad,  British  Consul  at,  257. 
Bagsters,  One  of  the  Bible,  37. 
Bailorabo,  The,  34. 
Bailundn,  37. 
Bainbridge,  405. 
Ballad,  English,  122. 
Bamboo,  348,  388. 
Bamboo  lightning  conductor,  349. 
Bananas,  85,  323. 
Bangweiilu,  428,  429,  467. 
Bantu,  280,  281,  .340. 

ideas,  10,  231,  271. 

of  the  boots,  (il. 

saying,  2,  454. 

song,  8. 

tribes,  8,  9. 
Bantnbenge,  331. 
Barbarians,  96. 

Barley  wine  of  Xcnophon,  222. 
Barotsc  Valley,  204. 
Bartimseus,  Sermon  on,  241. 


Barttelot,  Major — Murder  of,  303. 

Baskets  of  food,  217. 

Batelela,  332. 

Bay  tree,  A  green,  228. 

Bearded  tribe.  A,  183. 

Beast-precedent,  231,  232,  340. 

Beasts  in  prophecy,  241. 

not  immortal,  272. 
Beer,  120,  260. 
Beetles,  Dor,  338. 
Beeton,  Mrs.,  105,  106. 
BelgK  in  England,  326. 
Belgians,  258,  300. 

and  British  advance,  150. 

arrive  at  Mushidi's,  302. 

flag,  301.    See  Congo. 

Fort,  319,  326-329. 

King,  300,  414,  460. 

mistaken  for  English,  305. 

officers  killed  by  cannibals,  330. 

proclamation,  307. 
Bell,  Peter,  360. 

Belmonte,  Silva  Porto  of,  32,  74. 
Benguella,  The  Western  Zanzibar,  32. 

Landing  at,  4. 

Nearest  bank  at,  69. 

road,  184. 

Slavery  at,  27,  28,  30. 
Waiting  at,  7fif.,  20. 
Bethesda,  484. 

Betting  three  beads,  352,  353. 

"  Beyond  the  Sea"  innovations,  4. 

Bia  of  the  Guides,  Captain,  303. 

Bible-School,  The,  446. 

Bible  Society  of  Scotland,  205. 

Bicycling  in  the  trail,  381. 

Big  game  hunter,  291. 

Big  kill  of  hippo  meat,  467-469. 

Bihe,  7,  41,  143. 

Early  days  in,  37,  50,  65,  445. 

.Journey  to,  31,  34. 

Slaves  journeying  to,  31,  47. 
Bihean  dynasty  falls,  74. 

guide,  161. 

slaver,  30. 
Biheans,  32,  185. 
Billy  Brav,  69. 

Bird,  Cyril  and  Mrs.,  137,  138,  163. 
Birds  killed  at  one  shot,  400. 

on  Mweru,  399. 
Birds — 

Bittern,  485. 

Cormorants,  399. 

Cranes,  399,  485. 

Curlew,  399. 

Darters,  371,  399. 

Ducks,  124,  441. 
Tree,  399. 

Eagles,  116. 

Egrets,  371. 


2 


INDEX 


Birds — continued. 

Flamingo,  399. 

Fowls,  116,  397,  413. 

Goose,  Simrwiug,  399. 

Herons,  399. 

Honey-bird,  382,  383. 

Ibis  religiosa,  399. 

King-fisliers,  399. 

Lily-trotteis,  399. 

Nseva,  400. 

Parakeet,  48. 

Parrot  (Story),  104. 

Partridge,  48,  413,  416. 

Pelicans,  399. 

Plovers,  Spnr-winged,  399. 

Sandpipers,  399. 

Storks,  400-402. 

Swallows,  27.5. 

Toucan,  125. 

Vultures,  116,  162. 

Waterfowl,  399. 

Water-rails,  399. 

Woodpecker,  416. 
Black  and  white.  Nothing  down  in.  174. 
Black  Portuguese,  33. 

Thinking.    See  Thinking  Black. 
Blackbiini  quoted,  130. 
Bhieksmiths,  27.5,  276,  448,  449. 
Blackwater  fever,  137,  316. 
Blank  cheques,  God's,  69. 
Blanket,  Tlie  negro's,  71,  465. 
Blocked  roads,  6,  9,  10,  119,  213,  342. 
I51ue  sky,  99,  153. 
Bluebeard,  An  African,  229,  232. 
Blue-l)ottle  (lies,  220,  292. 
Boa-constrictors,  313-315. 

names,  3'.'6,  428,  429. 
Boar,  Wild,  348. 
Bodson,  CapUin,  30.5,  307. 
Bodyguard,  Mushidi's,  307. 
Boers  and  Portuguese,  75. 
Bog,  Crossing  the,  136. 
Boiling  a  watch,  176. 
Bonia,  300. 

Bonclianips,  Marquis  de,  305,  307,  312. 

Bono  kills  croc,  435. 

Book  of  Nature,  The,  151,  277. 

Bootli,  General  (([uotcd),  92. 

Boots  and  bare  feet,  375,  376. 

not  for  desert  s:in(lM,  157. 

Portuguese  convict's,  214. 
Borassus  palm,  386. 
"  Boring,''  33,  116,  406,  411. 
Bnrii  in  the  morning,  395. 

white,  4. 
I'oys,  African  and  English,  53. 

in  Luvaleland,  145. 
Brain,  278,  279,  355. 
Bra.ssour,  Captain,  326. 
lireaking  up  of  Mushidi's,  304. 


Bridging  gulf  to  spirit-world,  262. 
British,  Approach  of  the,  343. 

and  Belgian  advance,  150. 

Museum  sculptures,  315. 
Britons,    Ancient,   7,    140,    188,  326, 
352. 

Broken  earthenware,  186. 
Brooks,  Philli|)s,  472. 
Brother,  Mushidi's,  269. 
Browning,  20. 
Bryant  and  May's,  252. 
Buck,  Red,  87,  88,  269. 
Buganda,  468. 

Bukongolo  Range,  414,  415,  458,  478. 
Bulawayo,  Tlie  Mines  at,  104. 
Bull  of  the  herd,  232. 
Bulletin,  False  as  a,  179,  288. 
Bullets,  Mushidi's,  268,  269. 

or  hoe,  173. 
Bunkeya,  197,  221,  311,  319. 

Hills,  Tlie,  209. 

imprisoned  at,  9. 

negroes,  306. 

onlv  white  man  at,  169. 
Burial  at  midnight,  132. 
Buried  alive,  12,  452,  453. 
Burning  of  Missionary's  house,  11,  416. 
Burton,'  Sir  Riciiard,  18,  120,  166,  277, 
410. 

Bush-preaching,  474.    See  Preaching. 
Busoga,  468. 
Butenibo  forest,  337. 
Buying  name,  22. 
road,  121. 

CadenheaJ,  257,  259. 
Ciesar  (quoted),  188. 
Calais,  414. 

Calendar  of  knotted  cord,  175. 
Calico  and  beads,  117. 

coat,  398. 

Present  of,  214. 

Stolen,  121. 
Calvary,  Gaml)ling  at,  271. 
Cameron,  Lovctt,  184,  299. 
Canijibrll,  Mr.,  319,  415,  467. 
Camping,  35,  65. 
Canadian  Missionary,  A,  210. 
Candles  injure  eyesight,  250. 
Cannibals,  95,  423. 
Cannibal  arguments,  340,  341. 

atrocities,  331  (V. 

dirge,  337,  339. 

Meeting  of,  424,  425. 

soldiers,  330. 

taught  sanitation,  410. 

vanijiirea,  337. 

workers  on  railway,  111. 
Canoe  eaten  by  lions,  367. 

man.  An  old,  404,  405. 


3 


INDEX 


Canoes,  Begging  for,  397. 

destroyed  by  hippos,  426. 
Cape,  The,  300. 
Captivity  Epistles,  The,  198. 
Caravan,  Cook  of  the,  67,  68, 

Forming  the,  65. 

Government,  338. 

like  Lord  Mayor's  Show,  213. 

Missionary,  12,  17,  107,  291. 

plundering,  12,  139,  185,  291. 

Slave,  28,  163. 

Trading,  75. 
Carnivora,  340,  367. 
Carpenters,  Training  of,  446. 
Carpentry,  417. 
Carrier,  Death  of  a,  132. 
Carriers,  17,  18. 

Engaging,  66  ff. 

revolt,  67,  163. 

Waiting  for,  19. 

Weary,  97. 
Carter,  257,  258,  259. 
"Cartwheel  "  track,  7,  107,  115. 
Cassava  poison,  82. 
"  Catch-your-pal  "  movement,  9. 
Caterpillars  as  food,  313. 
Cathedral  of  the  dead,  264. 
Catumbella  Hills,  27,  33. 

purchasf  rs  of  slaves,  28. 
Caves,  Driven  into,  415. 

Shut  up  ill  a,  291-294. 
Chaniunda,  Prince,  175,  295. 
Chaplain  to  the  troops,  330. 
"Charlie,"  370. 
Chenda  or  Pilgrim  Town,  51. 
Cheques,  God's  blank,  69. 
Chicago  pig-killing,  54. 
Chief,  Chofwe,  336. 

Conversion  of,  246,  478,  480. 

Fisher,  244. 

fiys  to  Luanza,  246. 

Funerals  of,  285  tf.,  453. 

gives  concession  at  Luanza,  414. 

Kapwasa,  394. 

Luban  (quoted),  26. 

Native,  116,  117. 

Nkuva,  236,  237. 

Present  of,  214. 

Swiva,  337-340. 

Sec  Rob  Roy. 
Chigoes,  198. 

Children  betting,  352,  353. 

Hands  of,  443. 
Chilolo  Ntambo,  361,  362,  363,  365. 
Chiluba,  191,  480. 
Chimneys,  169. 
Chimunwa's  brother,  454. 
Chindc,  6,  33,  411. 
Chipuma,  360. 
Chisamba,  50,  204. 


Chisenga,  Death  at,  82. 

Chiwala  blocks  the  road,  342. 

Chloroform,  457,  459. 

Chofwe,  Chief,  336. 

Chokwe  country,  28,  113,  116,  132. 

Cho-na,  295. 

Funeral  sacrifices  of,  287-290. 

War  camp  of,  126. 
Christ  and  Temple  sellers,  30. 

Triumph  trophy  of,  223. 
Christians,  Negro,  355,  356,  398.  See 

Conversions. 
Cicero,  26,  43,  277. 
Circular  objects,  114. 
Clarke,  Mr.,  319. 
Clement's  word,  155. 
Climate,  The  effect  of,  5,  41,  152. 
Climbing  a  mountain,  350. 
Clocks  and  watches,  176,  177. 
Cobbe,  Benjamin,  101,  212,  415. 
"  Cobweb  path,"  9,  10. 
Cobwebs,  Breaking  the,  447. 
Cocoa  cultivation.  Slaves  for,  29. 
Coddling  the  converts,  104. 
Coilantogle  Ford,  122. 
Coillard,  M.,  204. 
"  Coil  of  roi)e,"  A,  314,  315. 
Coimbra,  Senhor,  184. 
Coleridge,  43. 
Colonies,  Portuguese,  5. 
Combers,  The,  204. 
Commandant,  Made  a,  325  ff. 
Compass,  Points  of  the,  468. 
Conan  Doyle,  Sir  Arthur  (quoted),  130. 
Congo,  The,  2,  3,  23,  204,  402. 

basin,  The,  163. 

flag,  The,  303,  306. 

Free  Stite,  29,  246,  300,  301,  302. 

Law,  475. 

Mouth  of  the,  6. 

Names  of,  23. 

Source  of  the,  112. 

The  realm  of,  2,  3. 
Conversions,  154,  155,  354,  355,  473  ff. 

of  Chief,  246,  478. 

of  young  man,  479. 
Converts,  Coddling  the,  104. 
Cook,  The  best,  451. 

Caravan,  67,  68. 

The  Chief's,  52. 
Cooking  men's  meals,  449. 
Copithorne,  Mr.,  137,  138. 
Cormorants,  399. 
Corn,  Green,  36. 
Corpse,  Embracing  a,  13. 
Countenanr^e  and  face,  478. 
Counting  ap])les,  354. 
Court  etiquette,  249. 
Covenant  of  silence,  449. 
Cranes,  399. 


4 


INDEX 


Crawford,  Mrs.,  99,  415,  416,  456,  459. 

Creation's  groan,  264. 

Creator  of  Human  Race,  269. 

"Creator,  The,"  48. 

Crickets,  54. 

Crime  at  the  Fort,  44. 

Crimea  cap-guns,  268. 

Crocodiles,  83,  459. 

and  elephant,  433,  434. 

in  flood,  324. 

killed  by  women,  434. 

kills  man,  274. 

Largest,  435. 
Cromwell's  first  standing  army,  225. 
Crooked  negroes,  113,  441. 

trees,  151. 
Cropped  ears,  291. 
Crossing  the  bog,  136. 

the  desert,  155  ff. 

the  Kwanza,  75,  94. 

The  Lualaba,  101,  236. 

the  Lufukwe,  394. 

the  Lufupa,  163,  164. 

the  Lukoleshe,  163. 

the  Lulua,  164. 

the  Lutikina,  163. 

Lake  Mweru,  365,  398-405,  412. 

rivers,  124,  394. 
Crucifix,  Natives  wearing,  412. 
Camming,  Gordon,  383. 
Cunningham,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  138. 
Curios,  121. 
Curlews,  3'j9. 
Currie,  Mr.,  37,  50,  204. 
"Cursing,"  The,  421. 
Customs,  Lnban,  449,  450. 
Cutting  teeth,  236,  237,  238. 
Cynthia,  140. 
Czar,  The,  178. 

Dahomey  men,  326. 

Damages,  Death  and  burial,  132-136. 

Dance.s,  54,  5.5,  120,  121. 

Dancing  before  the  Lord,  55. 

man,  17. 
Darter,  371,  399. 
Darwin,  274,  275. 
David's  fear,  257- 
"  Death  dealer,"  The,  243. 

ditty,  194. 

of  MushiHi.  307-309,  319,  347. 

Notifying.  134. 

Queen  Matayu's,  295,  296. 

sleep.  The,  456,  457. 

of  Smish,  321. 

Sure  as,  79. 
Debased  Africans,  144,  442. 
Debts,  Pay"'(?.  132. 
Deifying  the  Missionary,  101-103. 
Pclconimune  arrives,  303, 


Dentistry,  457,  458. 
"  Dentition  deaths,"  236,  237. 
Desert  of  Kifnmadzi,  155  ff. 
DevU,  The,  476. 

doctors,  180,  264  ff. 
Dew,  18,  19,  378. 
Dhanis,  Baron,  330,  331. 

Louis,  330. 
Dickens,  31,  188. 
Digging,  71. 

for  water,  156,  157. 
Dilolo,  Lake,  896. 
Dilunga's  child,  30. 
Dining  with  Mushidi,  169. 
"  Dirt-cheap,"  440. 
Discovery  of  murder,  82,  83. 
Doctor,  "The  native,  17. 
Dog,  Debate  about  a,  272-274. 

Eating  his,  244. 

as  food,  52,  95. 

Hunting,  348. 
Doorway  of  huts,  59,  60. 
Doyle,  Sir  Arthur  Conau  (quoted),  180. 
"  Dramatic  neatness  of  God's  methods," 

154,  215,  309. 
Dream  embassy.  A,  57,  58. 

of  Mushidi,  196,  230,  301. 

An  unfulfilled,  58,  59. 
Dreams,  56,  57,  230. 
Drinking  first,  71. 
Drink-sodden  slavers,  41,  42. 
Drought,  The  long,  248. 
Drowned  at  river  crossing,  42. 
Druids,  The,  440. 

Drums,  native,  121,  222,  224,  424,  439, 

cracked,  475. 
Duck-shooting,  441. 
Ducks  mean  marsh,  124. 

Tree,  399. 
Dug-outs,  75,  395,  421,  426,  427,  464. 
Duvivier  killed  by  hijipo,  462. 
Dwelling  in  unity,  74,  211. 
Dysentery  case,  181. 

Eagles  raiding  chickens,  116. 
Earthenware  for  Mushidi,  186. 
East  Coast,  6,  189. 
Eating  alone,  444. 

a  dog,  244. 
El)e(l-mplenh,  218. 
Ebenezers,  35,  36,  100. 
Kducation,  Legal,  133. 
Egys,  52,  53. 

Kgypt,  the  door  of  Africu,  9. 

the  fourth  plague  of,  13. 

Mamelukes  of,  .'iO. 

Monuments  of,  8,  9. 

Temples  of,  386. 
Ekonga  mountains,  84. 
Elbow,  The  non-bitcable,  167. 


5 


INDEX 


Elephants,  348. 

and  crocodile,  433,  434. 

Dense  cavalcade  of,  365,  379. 

dying  iu  Muntemune,  235,  236. 

fear  of  leechfs,  435,  436. 

hunters,  183,  437-439. 

Indian,  257-259. 

killed  by  boy,  459,  460. 

provide  pumpkins,  380,  381. 

ways,  377,  379. 
Elonga,  Mount,  34. 
Embodied  and  ensouled,  444,  445. 
Emerson,  275. 
Emperor,  Mushidi  an,  243. 
Empty  meal-bags,  132,  214,  383. 
Enfant  terrible,  Africa'.s,  19. 
"  England  on  same  scale,"  94. 
English  flag,  301.    See  Union  Jack. 

game  laws,  353. 
Englisliman  hoists  Congo  flag,  303. 
Englishmen  in  Africa,  406,  407. 
Entering  the  bandits'  stronghold,  291. 
Entry  on  elephants,  258. 
Epictetus  a  slave,  50. 
Escaping  from  snake,  252. 
Ethiopian,  Ebed-melech  the,  218. 
Etiquette,  Court,  249. 
Euphorbias,  386. 

Eurojjeaiis  and  Arabs,  200,  201,  202. 

excited  over  Katanga,  299,  300. 

laws,  143. 

ways.  Aping,  186. 
Exaj^gerated  reports,  328, 
Executioner,  An,  320,  455. 
Executions  of  women,  229. 
Exj)crience  the  only  teacher,  393. 
Expostulating  in  vain,  150. 
Expounding  a  dream,  56. 
Ex-slaves,  49. 
Eye-glasses,  249. 

Eyes,  Negroes',  4  ,67,  100,  210,  250-253, 
387,  473. 

Faggot-seekers  in  desert,  158. 

False  teeth,  438. 

Falstaff,  119. 

Famine,  214,  310  ft". 

Faraday,  14,  253. 

Far- Interior  caravan.  A,  65. 

Farrar,  Dean,  279-281. 

Fascinated  snakes,  314. 

Fatalism,  476. 

Faulknor,  Mr.,  209. 

Fay,  Mr.,  37. 

Fees,  Demanding,  180. 

paid  in  slaves,  192. 
Feigning  death,  338,  339. 
Female  goats'  horns,  232. 
Ferryman,  A,  35,  70. 
Fever,  137,  138,  211,  214,  377. 


Ficus  Indica,  393. 

Fight  with  hippos,  464,  465. 

with  lions,  105,  366,  368-370. 
Finding  hidden  hamlets,  352,  438. 
Finger,  Pointing  with  the,  86,  87. 
Fire-flies,  13. 
Fire  on  the  hearth,  169. 

and  water,  159. 
Fires,  Forest  and  grass,  98,  159,  248. 
First  to  cross  the  forest,  375. 

sight  of  Mweru,  359. 

stage  to  Bihe,  31. 

voyage  across  Mweru,  365. 
Fish,  413. 

taboo,  168,  477. 

Poisoned,  88,  89. 
Fisher,  Dr.  and  Mrs.,  138,  163. 
Fisher  chief.  A,  244. 
Fishermen  on  Mweru,  421,  427,  459, 
464, 

Fishing  kraal,  396,  485. 

weir,  434. 
Five  days'  siege.  A,  163. 

hundred  wives,  169,  229,  232. 

times  sold,  221. 
Flag  of  Belgium,  301. 

of  Congo  State,  303,  306. 

of  England.    See  Union  Jack. 

of  Portugal,  74,  75. 
Flags  as  receipts,  177. 
Flamingo,  399.  ■ 

Flats,  The  Lufira,  163,  344,  351,  354. 
Flies,  13. 

Flies,  Blue-bottle,  229,  292, 

Sleeping  sickness,  248. 

Tsetse,  248,  371,  381. 
Floating  islets,  461. 
Flood,  322,  324. 
Flowers,  The  home,  416. 
Folkestone  and  Calais,  414. 
Follow  your  leader,  17. 
Fonseca,  Maria  de,  184,  185,  190,  191, 
295. 

Food  in  famine,  312  ff. 

in  time  of  need,  217. 
Footprints,  Mushidi's,  270. 
Forests,  Crossing  the,  375  ff. 

God's  larder,  353,  379. 
Forsaking  an  infant,  138. 
Fort,  Arab— Kihva  Island,  404. 

Belgian — Mweru,  404. 

reached,  British,  406. 

Crime  at  the,  44. 

Injustice  at  the,  43,  47. 
"  Four-eyes,  Mr."  249. 
Fowls,  IKi,  397,  413. 
Fox,  Sir  Dougla.s,  111. 
Francis  Dnike,  421. 
Franklin,  Benjamin,  250. 
Friday,  Man,  67,  378. 


6 


INDEX 


Friendship,  181. 
Frogs,  485. 

Frontage,  Six  miles  of,  445. 
Funeral  bills,  134,  135. 
Chiefs',  285 fif.,  453-455. 

Gambling  for  the  seamless  robe,  271. 

for  a  slave,  271. 
Game  laws,  353. 

leg,  A,  454. 
Gammon,  Mr.,  415. 
Garenganze,  The,  269. 

at  last,  164. 

Church,  The,  455. 

Eastern  edge  of,  412. 

England  to.  111,  117,  118. 

hills,  164. 

Missionary's  influence  in,  37,  38. 
Gas-pipe  guns,  185. 
General  Booth  (quoted),  92. 

Gordon,  166,  195,  328,  329. 

A  negro,  222,  223. 
Generals,  Mushidi's  296. 
Genesis  and  Romans,  310. 
"Gentiles,"  94. 
George,  Mr.,  319,  415. 
Gestures  of  monkeys  and  negroes,  86. 
Gibbon,  47,  298. 
Gifts  in  time  of  famine,  217. 
Girl  weeping  in  the  night,  452. 
Globe  trotters,  56. 
Gnats,  13. 
Gnu,  162. 
Goats,  232,  336. 

Gordon,  General,  166,  195,  328,  329. 
God,  "An  Englishman,"  215. 

too  busy  to  care,  263. 

the  great  King,  424,  425. 

The  knowledge  of,  277,  423  fF. 

pretcn.sions,  Mushidi's,  240,  269. 
"God-ites,"  76. 
God-titles,  425. 
Goose,  A  spur-wing,  399. 
Gongo-Lutete,  331. 
Gospel,  Acceptance  of  the,  413. 

for  Africa,  113. 

Despising  the,  180,  231. 

an  innovation,  4. 

in  Garanganze,  473  ff. 

Only  one,  342. 

Preaching  the,  364,  395,  397. 
to  cannibals,  341,  342,  424,  425. 
to  old  chief,  75. 
to  dreamer,  59. 
to  old  people,  77. 
too  good  to  be  true,  143. 
of  Nature,  The,  264,  349. 
Government,     Missionaries    and  the, 
38. 

Grace  before  meat,  171. 


Grass  fires,  98,  248,  485. 
as  food,  312. 
huts,  97,  323,  441,  442. 
The  long,  18,  33,  247,  366,  367,  369, 

375. 
seeds,  367. 

village.  Burning  of,  441. 
Grave,  Livingstone's,  21. 
Great  Bear,  The,  72. 

Lake,  The,  348,  395. 

Lakes,  344. 

tribal  meeting,  440. 
Greenock  boy.  A,  330. 

The  gift  of,  420. 
"Groves,"  Cannibal,  336. 
Guns,  Antiquated,  185,  268,  456. 

Hall  of  Columns,  The,  386. 
Hamlet,  56. 

Hammer,  God's  Word  a,  475. 
Hammocks,  108. 
Hand-lopping  for  theft,  196. 
Hannington,  468. 
Hankansson,  Lieut.,  303. 
Hard  questions,  450. 

soil  softened,  154,  155. 
Hare,  Augustus,  199. 
Harpoon  men,  426. 

trap  for  elephants,  460. 
Haussas,  326,  327,  329. 
Head  of  Mushidi,  308. 
Hearing  weakened,  250-253. 
Heart  of  the  negro,  The  soft,  37,  195. 

the  real  culprit,  196,  197. 

versus  brain,  355. 
Heat  of  Africa,  The,  3,  5,  107,  137,  248, 

in  the  desert,  156. 
Heaven,  482,  483. 
Heavenly  calling.  The,  445. 
Hell,  Arab  word  for,  203. 
Henry  the  Eighth,  172. 
Henls  of  elephants,  379,  438. 
Herodotus,  267. 
Herons,  399. 
Hidden  trail,  350. 

tribes,  350-352,  438. 
Higgins,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  319,  416. 
High  Court  of  Appeal,  The,  265. 
"Hill  Difficulty,"  36. 
Hill-mcn  gain  footing  on  Mweru,  244, 

245. 
Hinde,  333. 
Hippo-raeat,  468-470. 
Hippo  patrol.  A,  426. 
Hippos,  Death  .struggle  of,  466, 

Fight  with,  464,  465. 

returning  to  die,  464. 

Schools  of,  463. 

Whistling  up  the,  466,  467. 
Hoe  or  bullets,  173. 


3° 


7 


INDEX 


Holmes,  Dr.,  390. 
Home,  29,  220. 
Home  flowers,  416. 
Homer,  68. 

Homing  and  housing,  446,  447. 
Honey,  413. 

-bird,  382,  383. 

intoxicates  badger,  370. 
Horace,  a  .slave's  son,  50. 
Horn  of  salvation.  A,  422. 
Horns,  Mrs.,  336. 
Hosea,  The  Book  of,  377. 
House  burnt.  Missionary's,  11,  416. 

struck  by  lightning,  348,  349. 
Housing  question.  The,  97,  441-446. 
Hudson  Taylor,  213. 
Human  "brooms,"  18. 

hands,  The  size  of,  443. 

hyenas,  337. 

race.  The  Creator  of  the,  269. 

sacrifices,  285  ff.,  454. 
Human  skin  as  carpet,  233. 

as  water-bottle,  270. 
Humerus  kills  croc,  435. 
"  Hungry  country,"  The,  116. 
Hungry  to  bed,  88. 
Hunter-chiefs,  348. 

converted,  437-439. 
Hunter's  dog.  A,  272-274. 
Hunting  dogs,  348. 
Hush-money,  453. 

Huts,  Native,  97,  113,  143,  419,  441, 
442. 

Hyena,  55,  296. 

Hymns,  Old  people  singing,  78, 

Hyi)hmne  palm,  358. 

Ibis  religiosa,  399. 
Idiom,  Native,  56. 

"  Idiot,"  The  Greek  definition  of,  240. 
Ilala,  Livingstone's  grave  at,  21. 
Ill-treatment  of  slaves,  46. 
Immortality  of  the  sou],  272-274,  423. 
"  I'm  your  Man,"  484. 
Indian  elephants,  257-259. 

file,  8,  17. 

Ocean,  343,  405. 
sighted,  33. 
Industrial  Mission,  205. 
Infant  sorrows,  144. 
Infection,  The  spreading  of,  439,  441. 
Influence  of  wife,  427. 
Jnr/eresa,  Livingstone's  name,  21. 
Injustice  at  the  Fort,  43,  47. 
Inkermann,  304. 
Insanitary  villages,  440,  441. 

I K  SECTS  — 

Ants,  312,  385,  478. 
Beetles,  Dor,  338. 
Caterpillars,  313. 


Insects — continued. 
Crickets,  54. 
Flies,  13,  224. 

Blue-bottle,  229,  292. 

Fire,  13. 

Gnats,  13. 

Midges,  14. 

Mosquitoes,  248,  377,  458. 
Tsetse  [Palpalis),  248,  371,  381. 

Locusts,  312,  315,  429. 

Moths,  13. 

Spiders,  338. 
Instinct,  274,  275,  389. 
Inver,  killed  by  cannibals,  330. 
Iron  boat  from  Greenock,  420. 
Isaiah,  247,  284,  318. 
Island  on  Mweru,  405. 

Kilwa,  246,  398,  461. 
Islets,  Floating,  461. 
Ivory,  379,  433. 

burned  for  fuel,  293. 

claimed,  235,  236,  460. 

laden  caravan,  186. 

Jack,  Union,  107,  150,  303,  405. 
Jackals,  88,  162,  385. 
Jehannam  or  hell,  203. 
Jehu's  taunt,  296. 
Jenneh  or  Paradise,  203. 
Jeremiah,  208,  218,  286. 
Jerome,  432. 

Jezebel,  An  African,  295,  296. 
Joab,  son  of  Zeruiah,  294,  295. 
John's  Gospel,  208,  479. 
Johnson,  Dr.,  139. 
Johnstone  Falls,  467,  473. 
Jordan,  Miss,  416. 
Journey  begins,  The,  33. 

of  Mushidi's  skull,  309,  310. 
Julius  Caesar,  326. 

"Justification"  of  a  child,  The,  238, 
239. 

"Kaffirs,"  95. 
Kalamas,  Mushidi's,  230. 
Kalamata,  A  true,  238. 
Kalamata's  town,  423. 
Kalasa,  Mushidi's  father,  181. 
Kalcba,  467. 
Kalembwe's,  235. 
Kalehe  Hill,  138,  163. 
Kalunda,  138. 
Kalunga  Kameya,  116. 
Kalungwizi,  405. 
Kan,  43. 

Kana  rivulet,  349. 
Kangombe,  116. 
Kansanshi,  cannibal  club,  341. 
Kanyon,  The,  34. 
Kapapa,  181,  307. 


8 


INDEX 


Kapara's,  A  lion  at,  366. 
Kapwasa,  394. 

Kara  ya  Rova,  The  legend  of,  269, 

270. 
Earema,  259. 

Kasai,  The  source  of  the,  131. 

Kasamina,  294. 

Kasanga  Valley,  348,  351. 

Kasansu  wrestles  with  lion,  369,  370. 

Kasembe's  capital,  359. 

Kasenga,  132. 

Kaseva,  197. 

Kashobwe,  433. 

Kasokota,  201. 

Kasongo,  477. 

Kasoiikomona  the  ferryman,  35. 
Katanga,  111,  299,  300,  302. 
Katigile,  197. 
Katondo,  338. 
Katumwa,  43. 
Kavalo,  General,  296. 
Kavamba,  Lake,  319,  334. 
Kavanga,  Gates  of  the  Morning,  344. 
Kaveke,  12. 

Kavoto,  the  Lion  King,  266,  267. 
Kavovo  quoted,  26. 
Kavungu,  163. 

Caravans  bound  for,  12. 

half-way  point,  185. 

Revolt  of  carriers  at,  67. 
Kayumba's,  270. 
Kazerabe,  233,  422. 
Kazombo,  138. 
Keating's  powder,  98. 
Keve,  Crossing  the,  34,  35. 
Khartoum,  195,  328. 
Kidd,  405. 

Kifumadzi  desert,  28,  155  ff. 
Killing  the  Best  One,  216. 

the  watches,  177. 
Kilwa,  246,  398,  461. 
King  Fire,  157. 

-fishers,  399. 

The  Great,  424. 

of  Katanga,  240. 

of  Mwcru,  235. 

Water,  157. 
Kings,  Native,  116,  117. 
Kinkondia,  Killed  at,  303. 
Kinsman-advocate,  263. 
Kishinga,  276. 
Kiasalc,  Lake,  303. 
Kissing,  450. 

Knives  and  forks  taboo,  170. 
Knowledge  of  God,  The,  277,  423. 
Kofwali  case,  44. 
Koni,  319,  473. 
Koran,  The,  174,  202. 
Kundelungu  Range,  112,  344,  350,  354, 
358,  379. 


Kunehe  River,  42. 
Kunje  River,  51. 

Kwanza  River,  33,  75,  93,  94,  162. 

Lak,  The  village  of,  46. 
Lake  formed,  A  new,  396. 

an  imaginary,  160,  161. 
Lakes,  The  Great,  344. 
African — 

Bangweulu,  428,  467. 
Dilolo,  396. 

Great  White  Lake,  395. 

Kavamba,  319,  334. 

Kissale,  303. 

Mary,  395,  396. 

Musengcshi,  395. 

Mweru.    See  under  name. 

Nyassa,  or  "  Maravi,"  204,  205,  411. 

Tanganyika.    See  under  name. 
Lamba  at  Mushidi's,  192. 
Lambaite,  A,  357. 
Lamond,  Mr.  and  Jlrs.,  467. 
Lamp,  No,  250,  251. 
Lainpstaiid  in  Tabernacle,  386. 
Lane,  Mr.,  74,  75,  213,  320. 
Language,  Speaking  the  negro's,  347. 
Largest  crocodile,  435. 
Last,  Mr.,  319. 
Law  unto  themselves.  A,  477. 
Laws,  Dr.,  204,  411. 
Lawsuit.s,  48,  132,  141-143,  245. 
about  dog,  272-274. 
Final  appeal  in,  265. 
Lecturing  in  England,  139. 
Leeches,  435,  436. 
Legar,  302. 

Legend  of  Kara  ya  Rova,  The,  269,  270. 
Le  Marinel,  Paul,  302. 
Leopard  on  floating  island,  461. 

killed  by  woman,  106. 
Leopold,  King,  300,  460. 
Leroy  killed  by  cannibals,  330. 
Letter,  Mushidi's,  to  Sir  A.  Sharpe,  302, 
303,  306. 

Mushidi's,  to  and  from  Stairs,  304, 
305. 
Lianas,  386. 

Libyan  Desert,  The,  402. 
Life  like  a  slieet  of  pa])cr,  356. 
"Life-belt  Lslund,"  462. 
Light  is  sown,  447. 
Lightening  the  loads,  68,  69. 
Lightning  conductors,  349. 

kills  lierd,  209. 

shows  snake,  251,  252. 

strikes  house,  348,  349. 
Likuku,  193. 
Likurwo  Hills,  291. 
Lily-trotters,  399. 
Lincoln's  saying,  360, 


9 


INDEX 


Lining  out' the  villages,  444,  445,  446. 
Linking  up  East  and  West,  3G4,  405. 
Linseed  oil,  447. 
Lion  commits  suicide,  358. 

Depot,  The,  266,  267. 

eats  canoe,  367,  368. 

killed  by  hoe,  370. 
by  Mbayo,  366. 
by  woman,  105. 

stories,  365  11'. 
Lioness  kills  woman,  365. 
Lions,  Famished,  366. 

Cannibals  like,  337. 
Literature,  No,  174,  234,  415. 
Living  Epistle,  A,  103,  210. 

the  Gospel,  474. 

together,  74,  211. 

with  Mr.  Negro,  51,  56,  445. 
Livingstone,  18,  21,  257,  410,  428. 

a  consul,  326. 

farewell  to  Stanley,  166. 

Name  of,  21. 

song.  A,  21. 

The  trail  of,  405. 
Livingstonia,  204,  205,  411. 
Locusts,  429. 

as  food,  312,  315. 
Lofoi,  The  camp  ou  the,  326. 

Fort  relieved,  330. 

River,  The,  322. 

Valley,  319. 
Lombe,  413. 

Loudon  Town,  Mushidi  dreams  of,  301. 
Long  Grass,  The.    See  Grass. 
Looting  caravans,  12,  139,  185,  291. 
Lost  in  the  savannah,  375  ff. 

property,  387. 

villages,  438. 
Loutitt,  Mr.,  113. 

Lualaba,  164,  167,  168,  197,  213,  264, 
328. 
bog,  273. 

crossing.  The,  101,  236. 

Hippo  in,  426,  465. 
Luanza,  421. 

Chief  flies  to,  246. 

Old  couple  visit,  287. 

River,  360. 

sighted  by  stork,  402. 

site  found,  413. 
Luapula,  The,  112,  196,  359,  375,  461. 

flood,  396. 

Pumpkins  brought  from,  380. 
Valley,  First  view  of  the,  358,  359. 
Governor  of,  364. 
Kazenibe's  rule  in,  233. 
Luba  country,    The,   185,   196,  334, 
485. 

Lubaland,  A  dreamer  iu,  58. 
Luban  cannibals,  337. 


Luban  dirge,  145. 
chief  (quoted),  26. 
children,  442. 
house,  447. 

ideas  of  immortality,  272. 
idiom,  194. 
Luban  liking  for  caterpillars,  313. 
manners,  120. 
saying,  20,  364. 
slaves,  29. 

women,  105,  434,  449. 

words,  9. 
Lubans,  95,  96,  192,  222. 
Lubiri  bog  tribesmen,  126. 
Luena,  The,  131. 
Lufira,  The,  35,  167,  319,  397. 

Flats,  The,  344,  351,  354. 

Valley,  181,  231. 
Mission  in,  322. 
Monkeys  in  the,  84. 
Lufukwe,  The,  394. 
Lufujia,  Crossing  the,  163,  164. 
Lukanga,  405. 

Lukatula's  cannibalism,  334,  335. 

Lukoleshe,  Swimming  the,  163. 

Lukuga,  426. 

Lulua,  Crossing  the,  164. 

Lumba's  escape,  333. 

Lumese,  The,  131. 

Lunda,  192,  232.  ■ 

land,  28. 

men,  222. 
Lunsala  Flats,  296. 

The  river,  223. 
Lunungwa,  197. 
Lupata,  Mountains  of,  205. 
Lusambo,  302. 
Lutala,  236. 

Luther  quoted,  110,  325. 
Lutikina,  Fording  the,  163. 
Luvale,  121,  139,  140,  185. 

bandits,  9. 

ladies,  140. 

land,  28,  155. 

lawsuits,  132. 

man,  A  hunted,  150. 

town  turning  to  God, 
Lwizi,  The,  393. 
Lying,  78,  174. 
Lynn,  Joseph,  41. 

Macaulay,  Lord,  398. 
Mahanaim,  329. 

Mahomed,  Carter's  servant,  259. 
Maitland,  Mr.,  113. 
Making  tools,  447-449. 
Malarial  mist,  18. 

mosquito,  248. 
Malemba,  112. 
Malingerers'  medicine,  180. 


10 


INDEX 


'•  Mamba"  snake,  252. 
Mamelukes,  50. 
Man-eaters,  330,  331  ff.,  423. 

hunting  hippo.  A,  426. 
Mangrove  swamp,  458. 
Manning,  Cardinal,  325. 
Map-makers,  267,  410,  428. 
Map  of  Africa,  22,  116,  245. 

Not  on,  438. 

OM,  155,  205. 

Wiped  otf,  441. 
Map  to  fare  p.  164. 
Marengo  Medal,  A,  142. 
Maria  de  Fonseca,  184,  185,  190,  191, 
295. 

"Married  Women's  Property  Act,"  235. 

Marshes,  14,  121,  24S. 

Martlia  and  Mary,  12. 

Marvin,  E.  P.,  374. 

M.iry  Lake,  395,  396. 

Masengo  lady,  336. 

Masoiuli,  Stanley's  man,  304. 

Massacre  of  the  innocents,  236,  237. 

Master,  Clioosinj;  a,  48,  49. 

Matayu,  Queen,  295,  296. 

Matches  a  boon,  251. 

Maternity  convalescence,  29. 

May,  John,  204. 

Mbayo  kills  lion,  366. 

Mbovola's  village,  365. 

Meal,  99. 

bags,  Empty,  132,  214,  383. 
Meandering  to  the  point,  115. 
Aleaning  of  names,  428,  429. 
Mea.suring  tape,  The,  445. 
"  Meat  hunger,"  470. 
"  Medicine,"  4,  173. 
Medicine  by  jiroxy,  179. 

sMiokc'd  in  ;i  pipi-,  179. 
Meeting  the  iiclgians,  305. 

Mr.  Cobbe,  101. 

of  the  two  white  men,  405. 

place  of  spirits,  26 1. 
Mellen  killc<l,  3:i0. 
"Memory  bIciKl,"  70. 
Menelik's  baptisms,  King,  242. 
Mercury  fatal  to  negroes,  180. 
Mcthoils,  God's,  154,  21.1,  309. 
Miambo  copper  mines.  The,  164, 
Midges,  14. 

Midiiiglit  niessengi'r,!,  Mu.ihidi's,  178. 
Mildinay  prayer  meeting,  68,  69. 
Military  triumph.  A,  221,  225. 
Alill,  J."  H.,  389. 

Milton's  Parwlixe  Lost,  2,  3,  233. 
Mimosa,  386. 

Minerals  found  by  Lake  Dwellers,  245. 
]\Iinos  at  liulawayo.  The,  104. 
Mirage,  A,  100,  161. 
Miranibo,  191,  237. 


Mission  baby.  The,  416. 

garden,  The,  416. 

hut,  209. 

school,  The,  446. 

station,  38,  56,  215,  217. 

veneer,  104. 
Missionary  bearings,  203,  204. 

belongings,  215. 

Deifying  the,  101-103. 

house  burned,  11,  416. 

pays  "Nkole,"  10,  11. 

protects,  150. 

Watching  the,  100. 
MiSSIOXAKIES  ix  Afiuca — 

American,  37,  50,  51,  113,  204. 

Anderson,  Mr.  and  Jlrs.,  467. 

Anton,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  319,  354,  355. 

Arnot,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  74,  209,  415. 

Bagster,  37. 

Bird,  C3Til  and  Mrs.,  137,  138,  163. 
I     Campbell,  Mr.,  319,  415,  467. 
I      Clarke,  Mr.,  319. 

Cobbe,  Benjamin,  101,  212,  415. 

Coillard,  M.,  204. 

Combers,  Tlie,  204. 

Copithorno,  Mr.,  137,  133. 

Crawford,  Mrs.,  99,  415,  416,  456, 
459. 

Cunningham,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  138. 

Currie,  Mr.,  37,  50,  204. 

Fay,  Mr.,  37. 

Faulknor,  Mr.,  209. 

Fisher,  Dr.  and  Mrs.,  138,  163. 

Gammon,  Jlr.,  415. 

George,  Mr.,  319,  415. 

Hannington,  468. 

Higgins,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  319,  416. 

.Tordan,  Miss,  416. 

Lamond,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  467. 

Lane,  Mr.,  74,  75,  213,  320. 

r.ast,  Mr.,  319. 

Laws,  Dr.,  204,  205,  411. 

Livingstone    Sec  under  name. 

Loutitt,  Mr.,  113. 

Lynn,  Joseph,  41. 

Maitland,  113. 

May,  John,  204. 

Morcy,  Dr.,  113. 

O'Jon,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  138. 

Filkiiigton,  326. 

Poiiieroy,  Mr.,  415,  467. 

•Sanders,  37. 

Schin.ller,  Mr.,  138. 

Sims,  Mr.,  467. 

Sparks,  Dr.,  41. 

Stover,  37. 

Swan,  Mr.,  43,  4  ),  209. 
Taylor,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  113. 
Thompson.  Mr.,  74,  75,  3'23. 
Wilson,  John,  415. 


11 


INDEX 


Missionaries  in  Africa — continued. 

Woodside,  Mr.,  33,  37. 

Zentler,  Mr.,  319. 
Missionaries  dwelling  together,  74,  212. 

and  Government  compared,  38. 
Mitumba  Range,  The,  302. 
Mixed  negro  population,  192. 
Mohammed,  201,  202. 
Molenga's,  116. 

Moloney,  Dr.,  9,  211,  215,  301,  30.'», 

308,  309. 
"Monkey  curses,"  381. 
Monkeys  as  food,  85. 
food,  315,  316. 
Gestures  of,  86. 
Shooting  at,  85. 
Yellow,  84. 
Monotony  of  diet,  413. 
Monsoon,  Breaking  of  tlic,  159,  160. 
Moonlight  dances,  54,  55. 
scene,  433,  434. 
Travelling  by,  36,  381. 
More,  Sir  Thomas,  93. 
Morey,  Dr.,  113. 
Mosquitoes,  248,  377,  458. 
Mother  and  babe,  29,  124. 

divorced  on  account  of  baby's  teeth- 
ing, 237. 
Grave  of,  452. 
Love  of,  221. 
worship,  262. 
Moths,  13. 
Mount  Elonga,  34. 
Moving  money,  28. 
Mpande,  181. 
Mpweto,  236. 
Muddy  wells,  157,  319. 
Mud  hut,  Living  in  a,  51,  4  15. 
Miigavi,  347. 
Muhemba,  95. 
Mukanda-vantu,  223. 
Mulangadi,  393. 
Midler,  George,  210. 
Mulonde  River,  462. 
Mulozi's  stronghold,  343. 
Mulungwishi  River,  367. 
Mumoneka,  170,  294. 
Munabushi,  96. 
Munema,  232,  203,  307. 
Mungodi's,  370. 
Munteniuno  River,  235,  338. 
Munyamweshi,  32,  96. 
Mupaka,  90. 
Murder  of  baby,  145. 

Discovery  of  triple,  81-84. 
Lingering,  115. 
Wholesale,  334,  335. 
Murderer  of  babes,  converted,  237. 
Muruturiitu  ))]ocks  road,  342. 
Muscngcslii  Lake,  395. 


Musenshi,  96. 
Mush,  99. 

Mushidi,  birth  of,  168. 
and  blacksmiths,  275. 
Bodyguard  of,  307. 
Brother  of,  269. 
Capital  of,  124,  167,  168. 
Caravans  of,  186,  189. 
Chamberlains  of,  230. 
dancing,  224,  225. 
Death  of,  307,  309,  319,  347. 
despises  the  missionaries,  211. 
Dreams  of,  196,  230,  301. 
Earthenware  of,  186. 
an  emperor,  243. 
Emjiire  of,  half  across  Africa,  9. 

the  western  door  into,  164. 
in  European  dress,  300. 
and  eye-glasses,  240. 
Father  of,  181. 
Footprints  of,  270. 
Generals  of,  296. 
and  the  Gospel,  240-242. 
Governor  appointed  by,  364. 
and  grace  before  meat,  171. 
"Gun-lie"  of,  268,  269.  f 
"God"  pretensions  of,  240,  269. 
Harem  of,  229. 
Head  of,  308. 
History  of,  ISl! 

and  letter  to  Sir  A.  Sharpe,  302,  303, 
306. 

and  letters  to  and  from  Stairs,  304, 
305. 

mutters  murder,  257. 

otfended,  268. 

quoted,  2,  228. 

retires  to  Munema,  307. 

roars,  193. 

and  the  skulls,  193. 

Son  of,  295. 

spitting,  260. 

Troops  of,  294. 

Triumj)!!  of,  221-225. 

unable  to  sleep,  178. 

Wives  of,  169,  22H,  232. 

Wife  of,  Kajjapa,  181. 

White  wife  of,  183,  1.84,  190,  191. 

White  slaves  of,  9,  215,  309. 

writing,  172,  173. 
Musician,  The  native,  17,  18. 
Musole  and  her  child,  30. 
Musungu,  387. 
Mutoni,  Lectured  by,  249. 
Muvanga,  The  tishcr  chief,  244-246. 
Mwalumuna,  462. 
Mwcna,  319. 

Mweru,  Belgium  sortie  to,  326. 
Converts  at,  30,  221. 
Crossing,  305,  398,  405,  412. 


12 


INDEX 


Mweru,  Elephants  at,  436. 

women  evangelists,  355. 

First  view  of,  359. 

frontage,  six  miles,  445. 

Full  name  of,  396,  428. 

Hill-men  at,  244,  245. 

hippos,  462-465. 

King  of  all,  235. 

Livingstone,  song  at,  21. 
trail  at,  405. 

Eugarugas  on,  32. 

sighted  by  stork,  402. 

and  Tanganyika,  426. 
Mwonga,  405. 

Nakandundu,  149. 
Naked  feet,  376,  382. 

negroes,  152. 

speech,  152. 
Nalingombe,  121. 
Nanga,  Consulting  the,  82. 
Xanga,  the  survivor  from  cave,  293. 
Napoleon,  142,  149,  179,  288. 
Names  of  Mushidi,  184. 

Long,  396,  428,  429. 
Naming  the  hippos,  463. 
Native  carriers,  6.    See  Carriers. 

children  corrupted,  442. 

eyes,  4,  67,  100,  210,  387,  473. 

in  the  dark,  250-253. 

diet,  99,  100. 

endurance,  378. 

evangelists,  349,  437. 

gestures,  86. 

huts,  97,  113,  143,  419,  441,  442. 

proverb.    See  Proverbs. 

songs,  21,  29,  151,  219,  220,  341,  422, 
455. 

travellers,  78. 
Nature,  The  book  of,  151,  277. 

The  gos\yt\  of,  349. 
Ndala,  30. 

Negress,  Old,  51,  52. 

Nero,  224. 

New  names,  22,  23. 

New  Testament,  The,  205. 

Ngoi  and  Miijikle,  12. 

Nicholas  I.  of  Russia,  304. 

Night  alarms,  125. 

dances,  54,  55,  120,  121. 

in  the  Hood,  322,  323. 

sounds,  251-253. 
Nile,  The,  328,  402,  410. 
Nineveh  sculptures,  315. 
Nitrogen,  470. 
m-oh,  9-12,  151. 
Nkulu,  end  of  cajpital,  168,  306. 
Nkuva,  232,  236. 
Noah,  Arab  tradition  of,  462. 
Nou-biteable  elbow,  The,  167. 


Nongwe,  245,  246. 
Notifying  a  wife's  death,  134. 
Nseva,  400. 

Ntenke's,  Captain  Bia's  death  at,  303. 

Numbering  the  days,  175. 

Numbers,  The  Book  of  (quoted),  40,  48. 

Numeration,  African,  278. 

Nwcna,  197. 

Nyassa,  Lake,  205,  411. 

Nyassaland  negroes,  204. 

Nyemba's  hippos,  465-467. 

Officers  killed  by  cannibals,  330. 
Ohwa,  Senr.  Z.  of,  42. 
Oil,  447. 

O'Jon,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  138. 
Old  folk,  76. 

converted,  77. 
Olive  branch.  Bearing  an,  361,  362. 

victory.  An,  123-127. 
Omande  shell,  The,  182,  191,  192,  222. 
Ombala,  75. 
Omens,  68. 

One-street  villages,  445. 

Opening  up  new  station,  467-469. 

"Open  sore,"  The,  28. 

Operation,  A  surgical,  456,  457,  459. 

Origin  of  Temyornl  Power  of  Pope,  325. 

Orphanage,  Midler's,  210. 

"Our"  Home,  not  "My"  Home,  220. 

Out-at-elbows  missionary.  The,  214,  362. 

P.  B.,  Senhor,  47. 
Paddling  canoe,  70. 
Paiva,  Captain,  75. 
Faim,  3,  358,  386. 
Pania,  .331. 

Paper,  Importance  of,  17*2. 
Papyrus,  274,  400. 

duck-weed,  461. 
Parable  of  black  morals,  114. 

Fig  tree,  417. 

of  the  Lake,  398. 

of  negro  ways,  382. 
Parables,  Native,  14,  412,  413. 
Paradise  Lost,  2,  3,  233. 
Parakeet,  48. 
Parrot  story.  A,  104. 
Partridge,  48,  413,  416. 
"  Path,"  Bantu  meaning  of,  8. 
Path-bortf,  A,  21,  351. 
Patriarclial  hippo.  A,  426. 
Patrol  of  hipijos,  426. 
Paul,  The  Apostle,  13,  100,  104,203. 

tlie  bondslave,  223. 

The  Epi.stlcs  of,  198. 

"manner  of  entering  in,"  213. 

and  nature's  groan,  264. 

Preaching  of,  425. 

at  Rome,  1 10. 


1 


3 


INDEX 


Paul,  Testimony  of,  423,  424. 
Paying  debts,  132,  134. 
Pea-nuts,  36. 

Peace  instead  of  war,  126,  127. 

with  God,  77. 
Pecksniff,  Mr.,  474. 
Peho,  116. 
Pelicans,  399. 

Perfume,  Flowers  without,  417. 

Petroleum  tin,  Mushidi's  head  in,  309. 

Pharisees,  African,  95,  96. 

Phillips  Brooks,  472. 

Philosopher,  The  African  a,  280. 

Phragmites,  461. 

Pick-a-back,  136. 

Pig,  Killing  the,  53,  54. 

Pigmy  forest,  402. 

Pilgrim  Town,  51. 

Pilgrim's  Progress,  The,  36,  474. 

Pilkington,  326. 

Pimbwe,  259. 

Pioneer,  The,  18,  20,  21,  67,  415. 
Pipes  taboo,  243. 
Pith  trees,  458. 

Plantations  of  God,  The,  375,  379. 
Pleading  with  condemned  Arab,  201- 
203. 

Plovers,  Spur-winged,  399. 
Plutarch,  277. 

"Pneumatic  tyres,"  376,  382. 
Pointing  with  the  finger,  86,  87. 
Points  of  the  compass,  468. 
Poison  ordeal,  80. 
Poisoned  arrows,  268,  352,  353. 
Poisoned  fish,  88,  89. 
Poisonous  foods,  315. 
Policeman's  helmet,  A,  120. 
Polygamy,  201,  231,  287,  449. 
Pomeroy,  Mr.,  415,  467. 
Pope,  The  power  of  the,  325. 
Popelin,  258. 

Population,  A  mixed,  192. 
Portuguese  advance,  149. 

aliases,  22. 

in  Bihe,  41. 

and  Boers,  75. 

captives,  12. 

commandant,  44,  149. 

convict's  boots.  A,  214. 

Fort,  The,  43,  44,  47,  150. 

lethargy,  5,  32. 

machila,  108. 

wife,  Mushidi's,  184,  185,  190,  191, 
295. 

Potato  song.  The,  412. 
Poverty  and  riches,  419. 
Powder  and  guns,  Refusing  to  write  for, 
268. 

Prtetorian  guard,  223. 


Praise  getting  out  at  the  toes,  55. 
Praising  God  misunderstood,  215. 
Preaching  in  forest  glens,  354. 

to  cannibals,  112. 

to  chief,  75. 

to  Mushidi,  240,  241. 

to  soldiers,  327,  330. 
Precedent,  8,  76,  231. 
Prepared  ways,  377-379. 
Preserving  man  and  beast,  437. 
Priest  murders  brother,  80. 
Prince  of  Wales,  A  local,  120. 
Prisoner  in  his  cell,  266. 
I'ropertius,  140. 
Protestant  Popes,  324,  325. 
Proverbs,  2,  30,  71,  122,  123,  175,  181, 

198,  200,  231,  349. 
Proxy,  Medicine  by,  179. 
Prussia,  Storks  liberated  in,  401. 
Psalms  (quoted),  16,  123,  228,  256,  437, 

484. 
Pumpkins,  380. 
Punch,  410. 

Purification  after  cannibal  feast,  336, 
Pyramids,  9. 

Pyrenees,  Africa  begins  at  the,  149. 
"  Python,"  The,  49. 

Quarantine,  209. 
Queen  Cafe  au  lait,  185. 
Matayu,  295. 

Maria  de  Fonseca.     See  Portuguese 
wife. 

Nyakatoro,  135. 

of  Sheba,  450. 
Questions,  Asking,  140,  450,  454. 
Quinine  tabloids,  377. 

Rabbit,  The,  175. 
"Rags,"  482. 
Railroads,  111,  163. 
Rains,  98,  99,  118,  247. 
Ratel  kills  African,  370. 
Rats  in  flood,  324. 

as  food.  312. 
Reading  and  writing,  71. 
Receipts,  Records  of,  177. 
Red  buck,  A  herd  of,  87,  88,  269. 

sunsets,  285  ff. 
Redeemed  slaves,  219. 
Redeeming  slaves,  30. 
Refusing  to  become  cannibal,  333,  336. 
Relief  of  Fort  Lofoi,  330. 
Returned  Missionaries,  139. 
Revolt,  330,  342. 
Rhodes,  Cecil,  300,  359. 
Rhodesia,  N.W.,  150. 
Rinderpest,  366. 
River,  Following  the,  136. 

torrents,  347. 


14 


INDEX 


Rivers,  African,  247. 
Bailombo,  The,  34. 
Congo,  The,  2,  3,  23, 163,  204,  402. 
Kana,  The,  349. 
Kasai,  The,  131. 
Keve,  The,  34,  35. 
Kunehe,  The,  42. 
Kunje,  The,  51. 

Kwanza,  The,  33,  75,  93,  94,  162. 

Lofoi,  The,  319,  322,  326,  330. 

Lualaba,  The.    See  under  name. 

Luanza,  The,  360. 

Luapula,  The.    See  under  name. 

Luena,  The,  131. 

Lufira,  The.    See  under  name. 

Lufukwe,  The,  394. 

Lufupa,  The,  163,  164. 

Lukoleshe,  The,  163. 

Lulua,  The,  164. 

Lumese,  The,  131. 

Lunsala,  The,  223,  296. 

Lutikiiia,  The,  163. 

Mulonde,  The,  462. 

Mulungwishi,  The,  367. 

Muntemune,  The,  235,  338. 

Mupaka,  The,  96. 

Nile,  The,  328,  402,  410. 

Sankuni,  The,  302. 

Zambezi,  The,  6,  112. 
"Road,"  An  African,  7,  17. 
blocking,  119,  120,  342. 
buying  the,  121,  126,  127. 
Roaming  tribes,  419. 
Rob  Roy  chiefs,  9,  116,  119,  120,  127, 

243,  291. 
Robbers'  den,  A,  163. 
Robinson,  305. 
Roderick  Dhu,  122. 
Roman  Catholics,  138,  139,  412. 
prison,  Paul  in,  198. 
soldiers  gambling  for  Christ's  robe, 

271. 
triumph,  221. 
Romans,  The  Epistle  to  the,  13. 
Rome,  "The  Bishop  of,  325. 
in  Paul's  day,  140. 
Slaves  in,  50. 
Rotten  ra<;s,  A  negro's,  218. 
Rowland  Hill's  "convert,"  104. 
Rubber  root,  132. 
Riickert,  166. 
Rum  and  gin,  41,  42. 
Runaway  slave.  A,  45. 
Rngarugaa,  32,  258,  298,  299,  352,  423. 
Ruskin,  359. 

Sacrifices,  Human,  285  ff.,  454. 
Sahara,  The,  402. 
Salimi,  150. 
Salisbury,  Lady,  199. 


Samikilenge,  116. 
Samusole,  150. 
San  Domingo  revolt,  216. 
San  Thome,  29,  75. 
Sand  the  finest  filter,  156. 
Sanders,  Mr.,  37. 
Sandpipers,  399. 
Sanga  Chief,  A,  394. 

civil  war,  299. 

Copper  King,  The,  181. 

Rescued,  182. 

warfare,  310. 
I  Sanitation,  440. 
'  Sankuru,  193. 

The,  302. 
Saturday  night  prayer-meeting,  437. 
Saxons,  352. 

Sayings,  African,  37,  50,  76,  77,  79,  116, 
276,  277,  384,  385. 

Schiller,  176. 

Schindler,  Mr.,  138. 

Schools  of  hippos,  463. 
Mission,  446. 

Schooner,  420. 

Scotland,  139,  201,  205. 

Scott,  Clement,  280,  281. 

Scout-canoes,  398. 

Scratoliing  the  soil,  418. 

Sea,  First  sight  of  tlie,  33. 

Seamless  robe.  The,  271. 

Seasons,  The  African,  152. 

Secret  Society,  Women's,  232. 

Seeing  farther  than  we  can  walk,  398. 
j  Sekeseke  case.  The,  47. 
I  Selling' the  children,  30,  42,  339,  340. 

Sense  of  hearing,  The  negro's,  251-253. 

Sera  man.  A,  244. 
plain.  The,  286,  453. 

Seti  I.,  386. 

"Settled  in  walking,"  20. 
Sliags,  9,  375,  376,  381,  382, 
Shakespeare,  193,  396. 
Shaking  hands,  362,  363. 
Sliarj.e,  Sir  Alfred,  300,  301,  303,  468. 
Shawl  a  clue  to  murder,  82,  83. 
Sheba,  Queen  of,  450. 
Shediling  blood,  Williout,  245. 
Sheet  of  pa]icr,  Life  like  a,  356. 
Shell,  The  Omande,  182,  101,  192,222. 
Shila  folks,  232,  233,  415,  427,  459, 
464. 

song,  422. 
Shiniba,  Tlie  Arab  leader,  361. 

blocks  road,  342. 

The  den  of,  398. 

the  lion,  361,  365. 

The  Rugarugas  of,  352. 

The  vengeance  of,  403,  404. 
Shim])auka  and  the  lioness,  368,  369. 
Short  sermons,  349. 


15 


INDEX 


Shut  up  with  corpse,  133,  134. 

Signing  the  title-deeds,  414. 

Sikispence,  30,  196. 

Sileuce  at  meals,  444. 

Silva  Porto  of  Belmonte,  32,  74. 

Simoom,  A,  159,  160. 

Sims,  Mr.,  467. 

Singing  praise,  123. 

when  it  rains,  98. 
Sirat,  The  Bridge  of,  202. 
Sirens,  383. 
Sixth  sense,  A,  388. 
Skin  carpet,  A  human,  233. 

the  seamless  robe,  271. 

water-bottle,  270. 
Skull  of  Mushidi,  309,  310. 
Skulls,  193,  229,  260,  261,  309. 
Sky,  The  African,  36,  99,  153. 
Slave  caravans,  28,  29,  163. 

children,  29,  219. 

degradation,  195. 

girl  clubbed,  30. 

mortality,  31. 

redeemed,  219. 
Slavers,  Portuguese,  149. 
Slaver's  widow  sells  slaves,  31. 
Slavery,  201,  342. 

in  Benguella,  27,  29,  30. 

its  effect  on  Portuguese,  5. 

Inter-negro,  48,  49. 
Slaves,  Price  paid  for,  30. 

in  Rome,  50. 

Trick  for  gaining,  45,  46. 
Sleeping  in  grass  huts,  97. 

on  the  shore,  412. 

sickness,  248,  300,  441,  474. 

in  tents,  97,  98. 

under  tree,  377. 
"Slough  of  Despond,"  36. 
Small-pox,  441. 
Smish,  320,  455,  456. 
Smiths,  Negro,  23,  448,  449. 
Smoking  medicine,  179. 

taboo,  243. 
Snails  as  food,  52,  95,  312. 
Snake  in  hut,  252. 
Snakes  as  food,  52,  313,  385. 

swimming,  324. 
Sneeze  greetings,  178. 

Mushidi's,  177,  178. 
Snuff  taboo,  24'!. 
"Snufl'-maker,"  The,  58. 
"Softies,"  76,  123,  140,  141. 
Soil  softened.  Hard,  154. 
Sold  for  drink,  42. 
Soldiers'  wives,  war  dance  of,  329, 
Solomon,  432. 

Song,  Cannibals',  337,  339,  341. 
of  deliverance,  422,  423. 
Native,  21,  194,  412,  455. 


Song  of  wild  woman,  385. 
Songa,  265. 

Sorghum  plantations,  393. 

Soul,  The  immortality  of  the,  272-274. 

"Sourcing  it,"  131. 

South,  Bishop,  144. 

Sowing  in  tears,  137. 

Spanish  proverb,  228. 

Sparks,  Dr.,  41. 

Speaking  the  language,  347. 

Speech,  Naked,  152. 

Spiders,  338. 

Spirit  1.  Has  a  dog  a,  272-274. 
To,  481. 

worship,  260-266. 
Spitting,  Laws  against,  143. 

Mushidi,  260. 
Squeal,  The  pig's,  54. 
St.  Paul  de  Loanda,  Governor  of,  183, 
184. 

Stairs,  Captain,  9,  301,  303-307,  311. 
arrives,  305. 
Death  of,  304. 

intercepts  Mushidi's  letter,  303,  306. 
"  Stand  and  deliver,"  119. 
Stanley,  246,  258. 

Cannibals  who  attacked.  111. 

Livingstone's  farewell  to,  166. 
Stanley's  column.  Leader  of,  303. 

man,  Masoudi,'304. 

tribute  to  Stairs,  304. 
Starry  night,  36. 
Starving  lion  killed,  366. 
Station,  The  Mission,  38,  56,  104,  215, 

217,  418. 
Still-born  child,  A,  235. 
Stokes,  258. 

Stooping,  The  necessity  of,  59,  60. 
Storks  migrating,  400-402. 
Stover,  Mr.,  37. 
.Strangers  and  pilgrims,  419, 
Strangling  a  lioness,  369. 
Suffragettes,  Negro,  232. 
Suicide  of  incendiary,  11. 

of  lion,  438. 

of  Silva  Porto,  74. 
Suit  of  clothes,  A  well-fitting,  214. 
Sultan  of  Zanzibar,  199. 
Summer  and  winter,  72. 
Sun,  The  African,  152,  156,  160,  248. 
Sunrise,  ."iO,  56. 

on  Kundelungu  Range,  351. 
".Sun's  little  Sonny,"  14. 
Supjiers,  Indigestible,  36. 
Surety  for  a  stranger,  11. 
Surgical  operation,  456,  459. 
Swahili,  95,  96,  112. 
Swallow  darting  South,  275. 
Swan,  Mr.,  44,  209. 

The  Slavery  of  Tu-Vaij,  43. 

16 


INDEX 


Swimming  the  Lufukwe,  394. 

the  Lukoleshe,  163. 
Swiva,  Chief,  337-340. 
Sycamore  drum,  The,  424,  439. 
Sychar's  well,  Christ  at,  263. 

Tabernacle,  The,  386. 

Taboo,  168,  170,  243,  427,  428,  477. 

Tacitus,  188,  222. 

Talashio,  170. 

Talking  the  sun  up,  406. 

Tanganyika,  328,  402,  410,  411,  426. 

Plateau,  The,  104,  204. 
Tangled  Isle,  405. 
Tantalising,  167. 
Taylor,  Mr.  and  Mrs.,  113. 

Hudson,  213. 
Te  Deum,  422. 
Tea,  69,  70,  217. 
Teeth,  False,  458. 
Teething,  236,  237,  238,  239. 
Temperaments,  Various,  212. 
Ten  years  after,  154,  155. 
Tenda,  131. 
Tennyson,  264,  472. 
Tents,  Sleeping  in,  97,  98. 
Tete,  General,  296. 

Thermometer,  Healing  virtues  of,  179, 
180. 

Thief  converted,  475. 

"Think  snake,  sight  snake,"  252. 

"Thinking  Black,"  8,  12,  14,  70,  114, 

115,  151,  152,  167,  196,  278,  281, 

388,  398. 
Thirty  knots  for  converts,  351. 
Thirty-two  months' journey.  111. 
Thompson,  Mr.,  74,  75,  323. 
Thousand  miles  to  bank  or  shop,  214, 

217,  219. 
Thunderstorm,  251,  252. 
Timidity  of  boa-constrictors,  314. 
Tinned  jtrovisions,  99. 
"Tin-Swallowor,"  Mr.,  316. 
"Tithing  the  corn,"  Monkeys,  84. 
Title-deeds  of  Luanza,  Signing  the,  413, 

414. 
Toads,  54. 

Tobacco,  the  death-dealer,  243. 
To-morrow's  news,  56,  57. 
"Too  late,"  76,  386. 
Tools,  j\ative,  447-449. 
Toothaclic,  457,  458. 
Topsey-turvcy  Africa,  7011'. 
Toucan  fcatliprs,  12,"i. 
"  Tower  guns,"  Mustiidi's,  294,  807. 
Town  wiped  out,  290-294. 
Trail,  The  narrow,  0,  7,  8,  9,  18,  19,  09, 
114,  375,  376,  3S1. 

Buying  the,  12C,  127. 

Hiding  the,  350. 


Trail,  Keeping  open  the,  122. 

Livingstone's,  405. 

"Shags"  on  the,  9,  375,  376,  382. 
Translation  of  New  Testament,  205. 
Travellers,  Native,  78. 
Travelling,  mode  of,  107,  108. 
Tree,  A  crooked,  151. 

of  witness.  The,  414. 
Trees,  Giant,  386. 
Trees,  African — 

Acacias,  386,  393,  402. 

Banana,  323. 

Calabash,  388. 

Euphorbia,  386. 

Fig,  121,  417. 
Ficus  Indica,  393. 

Lianas,  386. 

Mimosa,  386. 

Palm,  3. 

Borassus,  386. 
Hyphwne,  358. 

Pith,  458. 

Sycamore,  388. 
Trials,  Missionary,  211. 
Tribute,  118,  119,  122. 
Triumph,  A  military,  221-225. 
Troglodytes,  The  last  of  the,  291-293. 
Trunk,  The  elephant's,  435,  436. 
"  Truss  of  Calico,"  30. 
Truth,  80,  81. 
Tsetse  fly,  248,  371,  381. 
I  Tubal  Cain's  followers,  275,  276,  448. 
'  Tunis,  Stork  killed  at,  401. 
:  Turner,  359. 

I  Tw'gs  and  branches,  442,  443. 
Twins,  72,  73. 

Twisted  speech  and  manners,  115. 

Ulysses,  383. 

Uinbundu  jiolish,  47. 

"Undertakers,"  The,  435. 

Uniform,  A  mixed,  120. 

Union  Jack,  The,  107,  150,  303,  405. 

Unyanyembe,  32. 

Ushi,  191,  192. 

Utopia,  93. 

Vachokwe  tribe.  The,  75. 

Vahoniba,  95. 

Valoinotwa,  350,  351. 

Van  den  Ilnvcl,  258. 

Vu  Sanga,  183.  311. 

Vastness  of  Africa,  map  faring  p.  164. 

Vegetation,  Forest,  386. 

Vemba,  192,  196,  219. 

Vordickt,  302,  326.  404. 

Via  Dolorosa  to  Chief's  tomb,  289. 

Villages,  Native,  113,  143,  144,  485. 

Lost,  438. 
"  Visose,"  Scnlior,  12. 


17 


INDEX 


Voltaire,  180. 
Vultures,  116,  102. 

Wagogo  tricks,  139,  185. 
"  Wake,"  134,  135. 
Walupa,  459. 

Wales,  Britons  hiding  in,  352. 
Walk  of  life  symbolised,  115. 
Wangermee,  Governor,  330,  338. 
Wauyamwezi  Hills,  198. 
War  averted,  125,  126. 

between  Arabs  and  Africans,  361. 

brewing  at  Bihe,  74. 
Wasenshi,  96. 
Watches  and  clocks,  176. 
Watching  tlie  corn,  311. 
Water,  bad,  157,  168,  439,  485. 

digging  for,  156,  157. 

-bottle  of  human  skin,  270. 

-fowl,  399. 

-rails,  399. 
Waterloo  flint-locks,  268. 
Watershed,  The,  112. 
Waylaying  caravans,  139. 
Weather,  The,  153. 
W^eeping  at  mother's  grave,  452. 
Well  of  Sychar,  263. 
Wells,  Digging,  156,  157. 
Wesley,  John,  383. 
West  Coast,  The,  3,  95,  189. 

and  East  joining  hands,  344,  364,  405. 
Western  road  blocked,  213. 

opened,  126. 
Wet,  Getting,  71,  141. 
Whistling  up  the  hippos,  466,  467. 
White  ants,  312,  478. 

chalk  acquittal,  132,  134. 

lady,  The  first,  415. 

Lake,  The  Great,  395. 

man,  The  first,  395. 
The  only,  169. 
Parables  of,  4. 

men  and  black,  79,  215,  395. 
killed  by  Mushidi,  257,  259. 
Names  in  Africa  of,  21,  22. 

officers  killed,  330. 

slaves,  215,  309. 

wife.  The,  183.    Sec  Portugueso  wife. 


Whitefield,  George  (quoted),  110. 
"Whites  killed  the  Christ,"  216. 
"  Wilson,  John,"  party,  415. 
Winds  on  the  Lake,  420. 
Winking  with  the  eye,  27,  28,  408. 
Winter  and  summer,  72. 
Witch-doctors,  179. 
Wives  of  fishermen,  427,  428. 
"  Wolda  Gabriel,"  The,  242. 
"  Wolda  Jesus,"  The,  242. 
Woman  and  Commandant,  44. 

and  leopard,  106. 

kills  lion,  105. 

sacrificed,  Old,  286,  287. 

Wild,  383-386. 
Women,  African,  348. 

and  cannibalism,  336. 

evangelists,  355. 

Questions  of,  450. 

Secret  Society,  234. 
Woodpecker  reminds  of  home,  416. 
Woodside,  Mr.,  33,  37. 
Wounded  monkeys,  85. 
Writing,  71,  172,  173. 

Arabic,  201. 
Written  speech,  No,  415. 

Xenophon,  33,  178,  222. 

Yeke  band,  The,  197. 
Yellow  flag  of  quarantine.  The,  209. 
monkeys,  84. 

Z.,  Senr.,  42,  45. 
Zambezi,  The,  6,  112. 

The  source  of  the,  112. 
Zanzibar,  95,  303. 

road.  The,  139. 

Sultan  of,  199. 

A  Western,  5,  32. 
Zanzibaris,  259,  304. 
Zebra  Plains,  The,  164. 
Zebras,  164,  231. 
Zcbulun's  portion,  156. 
"  Zeuobia"  class  of  women,  233. 
j  Zentler,  Mr.,  319. 
I  Zeruiah's  sons,  295. 


MoROAN     Scott  Lu.,  London,  England. 


